England's Rise to Greatness, 1660-1763 [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520310988

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ENGLAND'S RISE TO GREATNESS

PUBLISHED UNDER T H E AUSPICES O F T H E WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Publications from, the CLARK LIBRARY PROFESSORSHIP, UCLA

1. England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: Essays on Culture and Society Edited by H. T. Swedenberg,Jr. 2.

Illustrious Evidence Approaches to English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century Edited, with an Introduction, by Earl Miner 3. The Compleat Plattmaker Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Edited by Norman J. W. Thrower 4. English Literature in the Age of Disguise Edited by Maximillian E. Novak 5. Culture and Politics From Puritanism to the Enlightenment Edited by Perez Zagorin 6.

The Stage and the Page London's "Whole Show" in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre Edited by Geo. Winchester Stone, Jr. 7. England's Rise to Greatness, 1660-1763 Edited by Stephen B. Baxter

England's Rise to Greatness, 1660-1763

Edited by STEPHEN B. BAXTER Clark Library Professor,

1977-1978

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: England's rise to greatness, 1660-1763. (Publications from the Clark Library professorship, UCLA ; 7) "Published under the auspices of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles"-Half t.p. 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1660-1714 — Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Great Britain — Politics and government—1714-1820 —Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Baxter, Stephen Bartow, 1929II. Series. DA435.E53 1983 941.06 82-40095 ISBN 0-520-04572-6 Printed in the United States of America 123456789

CONTENTS

Preface

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Contributors

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I. The Enlightenment Came First to England • A R T H U R M . WILSON

1

II. Craw v. Ramsey : New Light on an Old Debate • A R T H U R J . SLAVIN

29

III. Poverty, Protestantism, and Political Economy: English Attitudes toward the Poor, 1660-1800 • DANIEL A . BAUGH

63

IV. The Glorious Revolution as Spectacle: A New Perspective • LOIS G. SCHWOERER

109

V. Britain and Victor Amadeus II: or, The Use and Abuse of Allies • GEOFFREY SYMCOX

151

VI. Party and Patronage in Later Stuart England • CLAYTON ROBERTS

185

VII. New Light on George I of Great Britain • RAGNHILD M . H A T T O N

213 V

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CONTENTS

VIII. The Excise Affair Revisited: The Administrative and Colonial Dimensions of a Parliamentary Crisis J A C O B M . PRICE

257

IX. The Conduct of the Seven Years War • STEPHEN B. BAXTER

323

X. The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol • J O H N BREWER

349

PREFACE

During the academic year 1977-1978 I had the great good fortune to be appointed Clark Library Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles is a delightful place in which to work, and not merely because the building and the grounds are so handsome. Even more important is the sense of a community of learning, and the kindness of the permanent members of that community to visitors such as ourselves. It was a very special year for the entire family. The essays in this collection are manifold and various, with differing topics, treatment, and in some cases contrasting views. But there is, I think, more of an underlying unity than may appear at first sight. Most of the authors assume that a new era began with the Restoration. A unit, which for want of a better word we may call a century, began in 1660. Whether that unit lasted precisely a hundred years or whether it came to an end in the 1780s with American independence and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution is a matter of choice. In some ways the first twentyodd years of the reign of George III look backward, while in others they look forward to the Age of Improvement. They form a bridge between one era and another and, like all good bridges, have one foot firmly planted on each bank of the river. Thus, while 1783 may be the most useful single date for the ending of this century, both 1760 and 1763 would have their partisans. There might be more agreement, between readers and authors alike, about the predominant themes of this period than about its vii

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exact length. As Professor Heckscher pointed out many years ago in his great work on mercantilism, it was a century in which England had an exportable surplus of food. There was also a quite remarkable stability of currency values. On these solid foundations the more adventurous went out and built the first British empire. Scientists and philosophers and musicians at home could afford the time needed to make their own contributions, which brought the country abruptly into the very first rank in arts and letters, in the natural sciences, in music and in architecture. As is the case in every great civilization, something was owed to foreigners. The Huguenot, the Dutch, and the German contributions to English development were all substantial. But the English made many contributions of their own: for every Oldenburg there was a Newton; for every Handel, a Purcell; for every Ligonier, a Marlborough. One of the most important of the English contributions was that of a mass market for culture. Some of the culture of the century before 1642 was in a sense premature, in that the country could not really afford it. After 1660, however, there was enough money about to support a great culture in England, while that of the older Mediterranean civilizations slowly faded away. With prosperity came new mechanisms for the diffusion of this culture. Books there had been for two centuries. Now there were more of them, so many more that writers could soon make a living from their pens. The Royal Society, the newspaper, and the post office were novelties, each of them significant in accelerating the circulation of new ideas. It was perhaps not entirely a bad thing that improvements in transportation, substantial though they were, proceeded gradually. Eventually these improvements would integrate Wales and Scotland and Ireland into the English economy. Yet these outlying regions remained far enough from the center to retain their own cultural vitality. Each made its own contribution to the common stock, one with a distinct local flavor. Beyond the seas a group of colonial cultures developed in the course of time, but the distances and also the peculiarities of local conditions were too great for these to fit entirely into the mainstream. Wealth and the dominant culture were not the only things holding the empire together. There was also force. In 1660 there was available a large pool of veterans, men who had learned in a

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harsh school the necessity of working together for common survival and prosperity. It is from the Restoration that we can date the firm establishment of the British in India as well as in the West Indies. Building on rather spotty earlier foundations, they did more than merely consolidate and extend the work of their fathers. They created a new world. Naval strength was also important for English expansion. After 1689 the navy had a major role to play in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as well as in the North Sea. Even on land English military power became impressive. By 1697, certainly by 1713, English military prowess and diplomatic skill had made her one of the great world powers, as by 1763 she had become the great world power. Success on this scale made English ideas and customs fashionable throughout Europe. The ideas of Locke and Newton and their generation, popularized among others by Voltaire, spread to the continent as the Enlightenment. Since Noah's day there have been few entirely new beginnings. The English began the Restoration with a mixed monarchy in which the king was under the law. That legal heritage, of which Professor Slavin discusses one aspect in his paper, was unique in Europe. It gave the citizen some protection for his person and property against the state. Not enough for John Harrington, to whose sufferings we owe the Habeas Corpus Act of 1678. Not enough, in all likelihood, for the poor, who then as now could not comfortably eat a civil liberty. Not enough for Jews and Quakers and Catholics and Presbyterians. For them, at least, the empire provided a potential refuge, one in which they could persecute the even less fortunate Irish and Indians and blacks. Yet with all its shortcomings the English system did give the citizen more freedom than any other, more opportunity to make and to keep a fortune. And the Poor Law, in England proper, did provide some security for the wretched. In 1660 England was already prosperous, already free, already civilized, already the possessor of the makings of an empire. The greatest political question of all, monarchy or republic as the preferred form of government, had as it happened already been answered. England had had her Revolution and found it wanting. The Restoration restored the law, of course, and with it civil and political liberties for the fortunate. But it also restored the monarchy and established church. When James II abused the law

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and seemed to attack the church, he was removed, as an individual, but limited Anglican monarchy most certainly did survive the Revolution of 1688: it is with us yet. That the political battle was waged over a relatively narrow field does not deprive it of interest, and several of the papers presented here are concerned with political history. Professor Roberts quite rightly sees the power of the monarchy weakening in 1690, when Shrewsbury resigned as Restoration politicians had not done. Once the precedent had been established, the politicians were quick to develop the collective resignation as a means of forcing the crown on questions of policy. By the end of Anne's reign, if not before, they had seized much of the former royal authority in the vital fields of patronage and domestic politics. But there were some important areas in which the politicians normally took very little interest. Diplomatic and colonial matters were two things that did not often excite them. This left these fields open for continued royal activity. Professor Hatton has recently demonstrated in her splendid George I, Elector and King as well as in her paper here how much authority remained in the hands of that king, while my own paper discusses some of the inner workings of government a generation later. If Professor Roberts's paper does not by some chance go far enough to redress any subliminal royalist bias there may be in this collection, then surely the balance is put right by Professor Brewer's charming and delightful paper about the number 45. That gets us into constituency politics, radicalism, and the beginnings of a new age. It also gets us from the printed and manuscript sources into art, or at least into artifacts. Where a generation ago these might have been neglected, they are given careful treatment here not only by Professors Brewer and Hatton but also by Professor Schwoerer in her study of the ceremonies surrounding the accession of William and Mary. Artifacts and ceremonies alike had strong political connotations, and it is important that they are now being studied with the seriousness they deserve. One of the distinctive features of this century is the quite exceptional extent to which England was involved with Europe. Even after 1688 England was a world power only as a member of an alliance. She relied on the Dutch for money as well as men. The other allies were paid subsidies, grudgingly and late in the day to be sure, and they were more likely to be treated as servants rather

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than as equals. As treaty-making time grew near, they were almost certain to be left out of the negotiations and told what was good for them by the English and French. By no means all of England's reputation as Perfidious Albion was undeserved. Of all the subsidiary allies, Savoy was one of the most successful. In the course of his long reign, Victor Amadeus II, as Geoffrey Symcox demonstrates, was able to play the English, the French, and the Austrians off against one another and to make substantial permanent gains for his house. With Savoy, as with Portugal and Hanover, the English demanded economic concessions in return for their military aid. Thanks perhaps to the skill of the prince, perhaps to the fortunate geographical location of the young state, Savoy seems to have had more value for its sacrifices than the others did. By the end of the Seven Years War, when England had become so strong that she no longer needed continental connections, the house of Savoy was able to stand on its own feet. Although England had been manufacturing cloth for centuries, the tone as well as the nature of economic life was far more agricultural than it would be in the years after 1780. Colonial and foreign trade were considered far more important, and they were watched far more carefully, than were manufactures; and not merely because they were or could be nurseries of seamen. Some of the great lines of trade in this period, in addition to the cloth trade, were those in linen, tobacco, sugar, rice, and coal. All of these were items with an evident agricultural base. Wool and linen were of course worked up into cloth, just as sugar and tobacco and rice must be processed before they reached the consumer. Government took an interest in all this because the customs, very roughly, paid for the navy while excise, again very roughly, paid for the army. Domestic manufactures paid very little in comparison with land, which paid for the interest on the national debt through the Land Tax. Fiscally there was very little room for maneuver before the administration of the younger Pitt, and any change was feared because of its potential to increase the power of the state. Happy Hanover had no tax changes in the period before the French Revolution, and was content. England required many changes in detail, even though the broad outlines remained much the same for almost a century after 1693, and she was very far from being content. Tax questions could make as much trouble

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as religious ones. In his remarkable discussion of the Excise crisis, Professor Price brings up, among many other points, one that was ominous for the future. Here was an issue important enough to bring the administration into danger, one in which the economic interests of the mother country and those of a colony were diametrically opposed. Walpole for his own reasons supported the colonial interests—which on this occasion were those of good government—and lost. The colonies could draw their own conclusions from the incident, and did so. With every year the economic, and thus the political, interests of the colonies differed more widely than before from those of the mother country. In the 1730s the colonies were not strong enough to do more than ruin Alderman Perry, but a generation later they would be able to prevent the Stamp Act from going into effect. Dr. Price's paper raises another important issue, that of the efficiency of government. To what extent could the state do what it wished in this period? An enormous step forward had been taken in the 1640s, when—as in much of western Europe—the introduction of an excise provided funds for the establishment of a standing army. Students seem to be agreed that administrative efficiency continued to make progress, in one office or another if not in all of them at the same time, down to the end of the reign of William III. But progress was not to be a straight-line affair. Many years ago Professor Hughes noted a decline in the efficiency of the government from about 1730, and in my own research I have found there were certain things that government had been doing in the 1690s which it was no longer technically capable of doing fifty years later. In the interval, interest rates had been cut in half. But it does not help very much to have cheap money when what you need is transport vessels, at any price, and they are not to be had. Administration does seem to become more efficient during the Seven Years War, and yet more so during the second half of the reign of George III. But in the reign of George II there was not enough efficiency. We hear much too often that there was not enough religion either. And that seems to be a serious mistake. It may be that the heroic age came to an end in about 1691, when Richard Baxter's death advertised the passing of an entire generation. Yet the passing of one eminent nonconformist divine, or even of a whole generation of them, did not mean the end of Christianity in England.

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If there were a few atheists in the 1690s, there were very few of them and their conduct has received at least as much attention as it deserves. There were more Socinians and Quakers: like the atheists, their light has not been hidden under a bushel in the past two centuries and the careless tend to exaggerate both their numbers and their impact. Most educated people seem to have been Christians of the Anglican persuasion, even if they did not attend church every day like the Duke of Newcastle. Their religion may have been of the comfortable rather than the heroic variety, but it is always dangerous to underestimate the depth of someone else's religious beliefs. And certainly the record in the area of good works is impressive. Daniel Baugh discusses one aspect of this record in his paper on the attitudes of the period toward the poor. There seems to have been much more benevolence in the period before the death of George II than in the days of Jane Austen. The literate may have read Bernard Mandeville, they may have enjoyed him, but they continued to give away between 4 and 7 percent of their incomes to charity. At present the rate in the United States is about 1.6 percent, despite our much greater wealth. Doubtless there is much in the record of the eighteenth century to disgust not only the modern welfare worker but all people of good will. People could and did starve to death in the streets of London during the bad times at the end of the 1730s, as Lord Egmont noted. Such incidents were rare enough to be recorded at the time, and if we avoid anachronism we must admit that contemporaries did what they could to relieve the sufferings of the afflicted. Of the two papers in this collection which are devoted to intellectual history, Daniel Baugh's contribution has close ties to the economic history of Jacob M. Price. Attitudes toward the poor are a function, among other things, of national prosperity. Others have noted the increasing secularity of the period, the increasing rationalism and indeed mercilessness of the attitudes of the prosperous toward those who were less fortunate. Professor Baugh does what others have been less careful to do when he ties these changes to changes in the economic terms of trade between classes and to the emergence of a cleaner, safer world in the years after 1740. This fits in very well with the long boom seen by economic historians as beginning somewhere between 1745 and 1750. One hopes that not all the rich took their ethics from The

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Fable of the Bees, but some of them certainly did so, and it is sad that the prosperity of the eighteenth century produced such smugness. The paper by Arthur Wilson has special personal meaning for me. When I began teaching at Dartmouth in 1954 as a Ford intern, Arthur Wilson served as bear leader for the group. He was a fine human being as well as an inspiring teacher, and his scholarship was treated with great respect by those who knew the field. Later, when the two volumes on Diderot came out, he had a wider audience; but his first monograph had established his reputation. Over the years we had kept in touch, and over those years I had continued to be bothered by the concept of the Enlightenment as it has traditionally been taught. Received opinion on the subject did not make sufficient allowance for the English experience. When this opportunity came up, I asked him to give any paper he liked but suggested, tongue in cheek, a paper demonstrating that the Enlightenment was an English phenomenon. To my surprise and delight, I found that his own thinking had been along the same lines and that he wanted to do just such a paper. Here it is, vintage Wilson, very nearly if not quite the last thing he wrote. His death was a great loss to a wide circle of friends and students, as well as to the world of letters. This book is dedicated to his memory.

CONTRIBUTORS

Arthur M. Wilson was born near Rock Island, Illinois, in 1902. He took one B.A. at Yankton College and another at Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His Ph.D. was earned at Harvard in 1933, and it used to be said that he was the only member of that class to get a job teaching in his own field. With the exception of a stint with the OSS during World War II, he spent his entire professional career at Dartmouth College, where his final appointment was as Daniel Webster Professor. In 1936 he published French Foreign Policy During the Administration of Cardinal Fleury, 1726-1743 (Harvard). His Diderot: The Testing Years, 1713-1759 (Oxford, 1957) was followed in 1972 by Diderot, 1759-1784 (also Oxford). Twice winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, he was also awarded the Palmes Académique, several honorary degrees, a Joint Award from the Oxford Press and the Modern Language Association, and the National Book Award. Arthur J. Slavin is Justus Bier Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at the University of Louisville. He took his B.A. at Louisiana State University and his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. Among his many books are Humanism, Reform, and Reformation (Wiley, 1968); Tudor Men and Institutions (Louisiana State University Press, 1972); and The Precarious Balance: Government and Society in England, 1450-1640 (Knopf, 1973). xv

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Daniel A. Baugh is associate professor of history at Cornell University. After taking his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, he earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge. His best known work is British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965). He has also written Naval Administration 1715-1750 for the Navy Record Society (1977) and edited Aristocratic Government and Society in 18th-Century England (Franklin Watts, 1975). Lois Green Schwoerer is professor of history at George Washington University. After taking her B.A. at Smith, she did her research at Bryn Mawr and won her Ph.D. in 1956. She is the author of No Standing Armies: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins, 1974) and of many important articles. Geoffrey Symcox, born at Swindon in England, took his B.A. at Oxford and his M.A. at the University of Stockholm before coming to the United States. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1967 and has been a member of that history faculty since then. He is currently associate professor of history. He has written on The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688-1697 (Nijhoff, 1974) and edited War, Diplomacy, and Imperialism 1618-1763 (Harper, 1973). Ray Clayton Roberts was born in China. Moving ever eastward, he took his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Washington and his Ph.D. at Cornell. He is now professor of history at Ohio State University. His best known book is The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England (Cambridge, 1966). With his twin brother David he has recently completed A History of England (Prentice-Hall, 1980). Ragnhild M. Hatton is professor of international history at the University of London and is the author of Charles XII of Sweden (1968), Europe in the Age of Louis XIV (1969), and Louis XIV and His World (1972), as well as George I, Elector and King (Thames and Hudson, 1978).

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Jacob M. Price is professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After taking all his degrees at Harvard, he taught at Smith College for two years before moving west. His best-known works are The Tobacco Adventure to Russia, 16761722 (1961) and France and the Chesapeake (University of Michigan Press, 1973). Stephen Baxter is Kenan Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He took his B.A. at Harvard and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Development of the Treasury, 1660-1702 (Harvard, 1957) and William III (Longmans, 1966). John Brewer is professor of history at Harvard University. He took his degrees at the University of Cambridge and taught at Corpus Christi College before going to Yale, where he taught for several years before moving to Massachusetts. His Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III was published by the Cambridge Press in 1976.

I THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAME FIRST T O ENGLAND A r t h u r M . Wilson

There is something inadvertently obscure, as well as insufficiently explained by historians, regarding England's role in what we call the Enlightenment. When we speak of the Enlightenment, it is probably the France of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclopédie that first comes to mind. The Enlightenment in France, the siècle des lumières, represented also by Buffon and D'Alembert and Turgot and D'Holbach and Lavoisier and the Abbé Raynal and a host of others, was progressive, critical, controversial, contentious, and exciting. In its dramatic events, in its tensions between conservatives and philosophes, in its impact upon other European countries, the Enlightenment in France is the one best known of all. But other countries had their Enlightenment too. There is the German Enlightenment, die Aufklarung, of which Lessing was the greatest luminary. This was the Germany of Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff, of Wieland and Moses Mendelssohn and Reimarus and Schiller, the Germany in which even Frederick the Great, in his own wayward and absolutist fashion, was something of an Aufklàrer. More submissive to political authority than the French Enlightenment, nevertheless the Auf-

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klârung had its lights its lumières, too. It was Immanuel Kant who gave to the Enlightenment, everywhere, its most comprehensive and inspiring definition: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-inflicted condition of being a m i n o r . . . . Sapere aude! Dare to knowl 'Have courage to use your own reason!' — that is the motto of enlightenment." 1 In Italy there were Beccaria and Genovesi and Galiani and Filangieri and all the other illuministi studied so trenchantly and copiously in our generation by Franco Venturi. Italian illuminismo shared the general convictions and aspirations of the whole Age of Enlightenment, but tended to be most interested in problems of social, economic, and juristic reform. Beccaria's Concerning Crimes and Punishment is illuminismo's most characteristic work, as well as being a monument of the whole Âge of Enlightenment itself. There was an Enlightenment in Poland, one of the most absorbing in the eighteenth century, a national revival and leap forward into contemporaneity very much like that of Czechoslovakia under Dubcek and, like that, extinguished by the Russians.2 There was even an Enlightenment in Spain, the ilustración, stirring faintly and perilously under the shadow of the Inquisition, and associated with the names of Feijóo and Charles III and Campomanes and Jovellanos and Pablo de Olivadc.' There was an Austrian Enlightenment, made illustrious by the name of Josef von Sonnenfels and memorable by the overhasty reforms of Joseph II. George Barany, in a remarkable article, has studied the intimations of an Enlightenment in Hungary; and Marc Raeff has demonstrated that there was an Enlightenment in Russia, French in inspiration at the court and among the high nobility, but influenced heavily by German Enlightenment thought in the rest of Russian society.4 It might well be argued that in Russia the Enlightenment manifested itself, chronologically, as the last of the several national Enlightenments, being especially visible in the person of the unfortunate Radishchev and in the early years of Alexander I and the proposed reforms of Speransky and Novosiltsev, an Enlightenment movement that came to its climax and disastrous end with Pavel and the Decembrists in 1825. In addition to these several national Enlightenments, there are two more of special interest. One is the Scottish Enlightenment, which has been receiving in recent years the fond attention (and

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consequent upgrading) of many historians. The Scottish Enlightenment, writes Peter Gay, "had been developing its own tradition of secular sociological inquiry since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Francis Hutcheson, moral philosopher and student of society, had many disciples, a brilliant assembly of intellectuals—David Hume, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, William Robertson—followed, in the next generation, by Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart." 5 The other is the American. Here again, as in the Scottish Enlightenment, present-day historians, more (I think) than ever before, are emphasizing the impact of the Enlightenment upon events in America. "In behalf of Enlightenment liberalism," remarks Bernard Bailyn, "the revolutionary leaders undertook to complete, formalize, systematize, and symbolize what previously had been only partially realized, confused and disputed matters of fact. Enlightenment ideas were not instruments of a particular social group, nor did they destroy a social order. They did not create new social and political forces in America. They released those that had long existed, and vastly increased their power. This completion, this rationalization, this symbolization, this lifting into consciousness and endowing with high moral purpose inchoate, confused elements of social and political change—this was the American Revolution." 6 Now, where in all this array of national Enlightenments is the English one? As a matter of fact, a recent president of the American Historical Association, writing in 1976, evidently supposed he had dismissed the matter once for all. "The term 'English Enlightenment,' " he wrote, "would be jarring and incongruous if it were ever heard." 7 However uncommon it may be to encounter any historian using the term "English Enlightenment," I do find it in an article by Giorgio Tonelli, in an introduction written by Adrienne Koch, and in the recent writings of Henry F. May. 8 Sometimes one comes across a reference to "the Enlightenment in England," but this may only imply cultural borrowing, instead of what I believe to be the fundamentally indigenous nature of "the English Enlightenment." Why is the term not used more frequently? Must we accept the implication that the English did not in fact have an Enlightenment of their own, but simply borrowed from other nations? How can we make such an assumption about a country

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that possessed a Bacon, a Hobbes, a Milton, a Newton, and a Locke? Let there, then, be tested the following perhaps startling hypothesis: that the English truly had an Enlightenment of their own; that it was, chronologically, the first of all; and that its existence has been obscured by the fact that almost all of it occurred during the seventeenth century, whereas our customary conception of the Enlightenment has been nearly always associated with the eighteenth century. This hypothesis can be tested, I believe, by identifying the characteristics and phenomenology of the Enlightenment in a country that indubitably experienced it —that is to say, France. Having identified these characteristics, one can turn next to England to find out whether they manifest themselves there. If they do, and if the English phenomena occur a generation or so earlier than the French, then, presumptively, England did experience an Enlightenment — and did so before other European countries. Let me begin by considering one of the most conspicuous aspects of the Enlightenment everywhere. This was the development and elaboration of its ideas with respect to religion. In the seventeenth century, and increasingly in the eighteenth, the deepening and widening of scientific knowledge inevitably impinged upon orthodox religious beliefs, producing a sort of San Andreas Fault of theological strains, stresses, tremors, and earthquakes. The stress was greatest in countries where the government enforced religious orthodoxy, but the intellectual problem concerned Christian civilizations everywhere. In France the problem is symbolized by the war cry that Voltaire made famous, "Ecrasez l'infame." The least disruptive of the responses to this emerging threat to revealed religion was the growth of so-called natural religion. The ventilation of this concept was one of the early manifestations of the French Enlightenment. Diderot wrote in 1747 an essay entitled On the Sufficiency of Natural Religion (though this was not published until 1770). Previous to that, however, some of the pensées in his Philosophical Thoughts (1746) had alluded to the persuasiveness of this rival to revealed religion. Rousseau's "Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," which he interpolated in his Emile, published in 1762, is the most notable exemplifica-

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tion during the French Enlightenment of the argument for natural religion. The early and quite general presence of this concept in theological discussions in eighteenth-century France causes me to list it first as a characteristic of the French Enlightenment. But in England the idea of natural religion had long been familiar to readers of the works of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). And in the latitudinarianism of the Anglican church of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one may observe the continuing pervasiveness in English thought of this mild but still genuinely Enlightenment mode of thinking. More sharply militant, more harshly antagonistic to revealed religion, and much more characteristic of the Enlightenment in France, was the growth of deism. The origins of deistic thought in France go back, to be sure, to the Epicureanism propounded by Pierre Gassendi and his followers.9 Such "free thinking" or "libertinism" was, of course, highly illicit, and it was still very much so in the early eighteenth century, when unorthodox ideas could be circulated, if at all, only in manuscript. 10 But soon these French ideas began to surface in print. One of the most famous and abidingly influential publications of the century was Diderot's little booklet entitled Pensées philosophiques. This was a highly contraband work, deistic in all its implications and declared by the Parlement of Paris, the highest court in the land, to be "scandalous and contrary to Religion and Morals." Voltaire's beliefs, too, were strongly deistic and always remained so. He continued to appeal to a watchmaker God to the end of his life. The inculcation of a belief in deism may be listed as a second characteristic of the French Enlightenment. But deistic literature in France in the eighteenth century was greatly influenced by the English writers of several decades before. Norman L. Torrey has shown in his Voltaire and the English Deists that Voltaire was well aware of the deistic passages in Dryden's early poems, as well as of the writings of John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindall, and others. "In his later years," wrote Torrey, "Voltaire plainly adopted the entire spirit and method of the extremists in the English controversy."11 Perhaps the most seminal work of the whole deistic movement in England was a seventeenth-century one, John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696). In fact, deistic thought, which is one of the essential and abiding compo-

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nents of the English Enlightenment, proved to be very exportable. It was destined, as Franco Venturi has remarked, "to become a cosmopolitan creed." And Ernst Cassirer, in his Philosospoke of "the extraordinary effect phy of the Enlightenment, which English deism had on the intellectual life of the eighteenth century." 11 Another conspicuous feature of the French Enlightenment was the growth of philosophical materialism, a development associated with the names of La Mettrie, Diderot, Dom Deschamps, and especially D'Holbach. Although deplored by Voltaire (so much so that it caused a kind of "civil war" among the philosophes), it is nevertheless one of the earmarks of the French Enlightenment.14 But, in point of fact, it was anticipated in England, first of all in the materialistic and mechanistic psychology of Hobbes. 14 Even in John Locke's writings there is a passage that seems to allow for a materialistic view of the universe, a passage that did not go unnoticed by French writers.15 And an important new element in materialistic thought, namely, the concept that motion is an inherent property of matter, was contributed by John Toland. (It was not for nothing that in 1768 D'Holbach translated Toland's Letter to Serena, written in 1704.) 16 Here again, what was really the English Enlightenment foreshadowed the one in France. A fourth characteristic of the French Enlightenment was the desire for a polity that allowed religious toleration. In a country where the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had forced thousands and thousands of French citizens into exile, religious bigotry continued to be oppressive throughout most of the eighteenth century. Huguenot women were imprisoned for long terms merely because they attended Calvinist services; and, for the same offense, Huguenot men were sentenced to row in the navy's galleys. Unavoidably the philosophes yearned for legal religious toleration. Voltaire was to remark of the British in the sixth letter of his Lettres philosophiques, "If there were only one religion in England, we should have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness." Powerful currents of English opinion had agitated for religious freedom throughout the seventeenth century. There were Roger

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Williams in Rhode Island and Anne Hutchinson in Massachusetts, and there was John Milton's Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Shewing that It is not Lawfull for Any Power on Earth to Compell in Matters of Religion (1659). Moreover, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English had already achieved legal freedom to worship. They did so through the Act of Toleration of 1689, although it must be granted that toleration did not extend to Roman Catholics or to persons, such as Jews, denying the Trinity. Still, it was a great victory for the Dissenters, who had had their own painful tribulations as late as the punitive Conventicle Acts of the 1660s. What can be spoken of as the English Enlightenment achieved for Britons by 1689 what the Huguenots in France were not allowed to enjoy until almost a century later, 1787. The French Enlightenment not only desired greater legal guarantees of religious freedom but it also preached the virtues of a general broadmindedness. Here the philosophes followed the example not only of their own Pierre Bayle, but also of Lord Shaftesbury. A translation of Shaftesbury's Essay on Merit and. Virtue was Diderot's first publication (1745). He prefaced it with an open letter "A mon frère," in which he extolled tolerance and inveighed against bigotry, referring especially to the French civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century. Diderot continued to attack intolerance throughout the rest of his life, a signal illustration of this attitude being his article on that subject in the Encyclopédie. As for Voltaire, one of his most famous books was his Traité sur la tolérance (176S). Philosophes liked to claim, with Voltaire, that they ran a slight fever every year on the anniversary of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. The emphasis on tolerance is in my enumeration the fifth characteristic of the French Enlightenment. But this had been the burden in 1689 of John Locke's argument in his Letter Concerning Toleration. And just to show how influential was his Letter, which I conceive to be representative of what should be called the English Enlightenment, it might be mentioned that Diderot, in bis Encyclopédie article "Irréligieux," made the point that religiosity is relative: no one in Paris is going to treat a Muslim as a criminal if he manifests contempt for the law of Mohammed, nor will anyone at Constantinople treat a Christian as a criminal for

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opposing Christianity—an argument that comes straight out of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, though Diderot did not choose or did not dare to say so. Another characteristic of the Enlightenment in France, and one strongly pronounced, was the struggle of the philosophes for freedom of the press. How they did chafe against the elaborate governmental apparatus of censorship! They coexisted with it in a love-hate relationship, for it imprisoned them (as it did Voltaire and the Abbé Raynal)—and it made them famous. What inventive and ingenious subterfuges, many of them illegal, the philosophes used to circumvent the censorship! Even those of their writings that were passed by the censors and then legally published in France always needed, sophisticates knew, to be carefully scrutinized for veiled meanings and Aesopian language. 17 Often the rewards were great. In England the merits of a free press and the disadvantages of censorship had long since been set forth in history's most eloquent essay on intellectual freedom, Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Previous censorship, that is, the official blue-penciling of manuscripts before they are even allowed to go to the printer, was deliberately discontinued in England in 1695, when Parliament intentionally failed to renew the Licensing Act. Thereafter English citizens were spared the anxieties and annoyances and frustrations of censorship that filled the lives and embittered the dispositions of men of letters in France, although, it should be admitted, even after 1695 the English government could still discommode authors by the vigorous execution of libel suits. Nevertheless, legal freedom to publish became for an Englishman a matter of course. He came to take it for granted. 18 So too, apparently, have historians, thus forgetting how effectually, and as early as the seventeenth century, the English achieved one of the greatest blessings of enlightenment. For men of letters in France (and they, of course, were the class of men most effective in changing public opinion), the most intimidating menace of the apparatus of censorship was the constant threat of arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment. The country had no right of habeas corpus. Consequently, one of the characteristics of the French Enlightenment was a conviction that the fact that lettres de cachet were legal was another example of the unfairness and injustice of the whole system of French jurispru-

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dence, demonstrated further in the miscarriage of justice in the cases of Calas and of the Chevalier de La Barre. This, then, may be said to be another characteristic of the French Enlightenment, though not of course so weighty as, say, the love of science or hatred of bigotry. Still, Diderot made a lettre de cachet play a villainous role in the plot of his Le Père de famille, and Mirabeau wrote in 1778 his vigorous and trenchant Des lettres de cachet et des prisons d'Etat (published in 1782—in Hamburg, and not, one may well imagine, in Paris). Moreover, some of the cahiers de doléances of 1789 mention lettres de cachet as a grievance. 19 Meanwhile the English, a shining example to all, had enjoyed the rights of habeas corpus since the act of that name of 1679. An important element in the thinking of the French Enlightenment, so important that it may here be accounted its eighth characteristic, was the direct influence of Lord Bacon. There was an exciting and stimulating down-to-earthness in Bacon's empirical method and in his philosophy of empiricism. Especially was Bacon associated in France with the Encyclopédie, a work that has been called "the most impressive cultural document of the Enlightenment and at the same time the most effective in propagating its ideas."20 The Encyclopédie 's famous chart or Detailed System of Human Knowledge, folded into the first volume, was modeled after Bacon: "We have confessed in several places in the Prospectus," wrote the editors, "that our principal obligation for our encyclopedic tree was to Chancellor Bacon." D'Alembert remarked in his "Preliminary Discourse" that "One would be tempted to regard him [Bacon] as the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers." Diderot, who, according to one of his friends writing in 1756, had been studying Bacon for ten years, modeled his own Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (1753) on Bacon. In addition, he encouraged his friend Alexandre Deleyre to publish in 1755 the Analyse de la philosophie du Chancelier François Bacon. Further, in the article "Encyclopédie," in the fifth volume, Diderot boasted, "I believe that I have taught my fellow citizens to esteem and read Chancellor Bacon; this profound author has been more dipped into the past five or six years than he ever was before."* l It is both amusing and significant that the arch-conservative Joseph de Maistre, in books like Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (1821), devoted much time to singling out and attacking Bacon as the prime

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originator of what De Maistre regarded as the going-wrong of the eighteenth century. Naturally, the fellow countrymen of Bacon also felt the impact of his ideas. This was most evident in the motives of the founders of the Royal Society (more precisely styled the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge), which was formally established in 1660 and received its charter from the Crown in 1662. It has rightly been said, "The vision of Francis Bacon inspired the founders of the Royal Society in three ways. It laid stress on the communal working of scientists: for example, in the New Atlantis there is a College of Natural Philosophy... in which the philosophers work together 'dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.' It constantly presented science as an activity designed to serve mankind. . . . And it advocated throughout, and for the first time, what is essentially the modern scientific method: the making of experiments, the drawing of general conclusions from them, and the testing of these generalizations in further experiments. " " The Royal Society and the French Académie Royale des Sciences, founded six years later, were the prototypes and inspiration of the numerous academies that sprang up in the eighteenth century and which sedulously exchanged their proceedings and transactions in a common desire to spread knowledge. This was part of the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. The impulse to make new scientific discoveries and to impart knowledge concerning them is a conspicuous feature of the whole Enlightenment. In France this impulse especially manifested itself through the activities of the Académie des Sciences and through Diderot's Encyclopédie. But so far as priority is concerned, it is well to remember that the Royal Society of London was first in the field. This brings me to the influence of Newtonianism in the Enlightenment, an influence so enormous and so well known that, paradoxically, there is no need to dilate upon it in a paper of this kind, save to recall that Newton, after all, was English! His name became a shibboleth, and for what? Not only for the magnitude of a past achievement, but also for the promise of things to come. The method of Newton and Newtonianism, which to the French Enlightenment signified what we mean today when we say "science," supported and fortified the zestful and exciting notion inspiring the whole Enlightenment movement, that man's discov-

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eries and man's life on earth were not at an ending, but at a beginning. This euphoria is close to the heart of what enlightenment is, suffusing the era with hopefulness and high morale. I count it as one of the characteristics of the Enlightenment. It is this faith in scientific reasoning that earned the eighteenth century the title of the "Age of Reason," a faith that was a large part of the "philosophy" that made the philosophes deem themselves philosophers. "The philosophy of the eighteenth century takes u p . . . the methodological pattern of Newton's physics.... Reason is now looked upon rather as. . . the original intellectual force which guides the discovery and determination of truth. . .," wrote Cassirer. "The whole eighteenth century understands reason in this sense... as a kind of energy, a f o r c e . . . . " " This is how it is that the eighteenth century could claim that theirs was par excellence the Age of Reason. This faith in reason constitutes the eleventh in my enumeration of the characteristics of the French Enlightenment. A twelfth characteristic of the French Enlightenment was its great interest in what amounts to psychology. Instances of this interest were the Abbé Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and his famous Traité des sensations (1754). Such also were Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749) and his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751). Also of extreme importance in the history of ideas in the eighteenth century were Helvétius' De l'Esprit (1758), which caused a tremendous uproar, and his De l'Homme (1773). These books, in turn, prompted Diderot to write his Réfutation de l'ouvrage d'Helvétius intitulé l'Homme (1773-1774). Now, all of this —all this sensationalistic psychology so characteristic of the Enlightenment—stems from John Locke and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke's work is of course a treatise on metaphysics, on epistemology. But Locke was also a physician, besides being a philosopher, and many of his dicta in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as also in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), depend upon the empirical method and upon actual observation of behavior. Thus, Locke became a kind of intellectual parent of the effort (conspicuous in the French, Italian, and Scottish Enlightenments) to extend the scientific method to social studies and to the study of man.

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Locke was emphatic in declaring that there is no such thing as an innate idea, for nothing conceptual is inborn in human beings. All that human beings can ever know they have to learn; all that they can ever know has first to be transmitted to them through their senses. Hence, the name "sensationalist psychology." The banishment of the notion of innate ideas was a giant step forward in the understanding of why we behave like human beings, and it had many implications affecting the French Enlightenment, for, as Cassirer remarked, "On all questions of psychology and the theory of knowledge Locke's authority remained practically unchallenged throughout the first half of the eighteenth century."*4 One of these implications, which most of the philosophes deduced with a logicality that was somewhat overweening, was that nurture is much more important than nature, and that therefore there is almost no limit to the extent that human improvement can be accomplished by education. Faith in the improvement — their own word was "perfectibility"—of man contributed greatly to the dynamism of the Enlightenment, its optimism, its morale, its faith in progress. The psychological doctrines of Locke underlay these happy assumptions. For both in his psychology and in his political theory, Locke took the liberal view of the nature of man. Another characteristic of the French Enlightenment is that it possessed a quite definite political theory. Until comparatively recent years it was generally supposed that there was not much writing on political theory in the French Enlightenment, save by Montesquieu and Rousseau. But now numerous scholars have changed all that. Thus we have Peter Gay's work on Voltaire's Politics; John Lough's and Eberhard Weis's on political theory in the Encyclopédie; on D'Holbach, Jeroom Vercruysse and Virgil Topazio; and on Diderot, the writings of Paul Verniére, Jacques Proust, Yves Benot, Paolo Alatri, and Anthony Strugnell. 25 Their researches and analyses confirm a judgment of the Encyclopédie made by an English journalist in 1768: "We must observe likewise, to the honour of the authors who have had the conduct of the Encyclopédie, that the same manly freedom of sentiment which is observable in the philosophical and other departments of this work, is eminently conspicuous in the political. In short, whoever takes the trouble of combining the several political articles, will find that they form a noble system of civil liberty; and how-

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ever, as Englishmen, we may have no reason to rejoice at the prospect of a gradual establishment of such a system among our rivals, yet as friends to the rights of mankind, we are delighted to see such a generous system everywhere expanding its influence." 26 This political theory not only emphasized natural and civil rights for the individual but also was concerned with limiting the powers of overmighty government. Writing on "Autorité, politique" in the very first volume of the Encyclopédie—an article which very nearly caused the government's discontinuing the whole enterprise—Diderot declared that "No man has received from nature the right of commanding o t h e r s . . . . True and legitimate power thus necessarily has l i m i t s . . . . The prince holds from his subjects themselves the authority that he has over them; and this authority is limited by the laws of nature and of the State." This, obviously, is an appeal to the ideals of limited monarchy and constitutional restraints, a very bold statement at a time when the monarchy of Louis XV was still vehemently asserting the absolutistic principles of Louis XIV. ,T Yet this is the sort of thing that the English had already achieved as a result of the Revolution of 1688. And it was from England, rather than from France's own political theorists (say, for example, Jean Bodin) that French political theory was borrowing at that time. It was a foreign importation. English precedents and English political philosophy were heavily drawn upon by the philosophes. In his famous doctrine of the separation of powers—executive, legislative, and judicial—Montesquieu thought, though quite mistakenly, that he was describing the English constitution of his day. Rousseau's Du contrat social is an adaptation of the contract theory of government as we see it in Hobbes and Locke. Both with regard to limited, constitutional government and with respect to natural rights, the political theory of Diderot and of the Encyclopedists can be described as closely resembling that of John Locke. As Eberhard Weis has remarked, "Scarcely any work of the eighteenth century contributed as much as did the Encyclopédie to the dissemination in France of Locke's political theory. " " To say that the political theory of the Encyclopédie was Lockean is a shorthand way of saying that it emphasized natural rights and considered these rights as anterior to government. Locke repeatedly stated that the only reason for government—the only

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reason a human being subjects himself to the constraints of civil government — is the safeguarding of man's natural rights to life, liberty, and estate. In the American phraseology (for Jefferson followed Locke closely, of course) government exists "to secure these rights"—rights that had always existed, before there were any governments, rights which governments could not create, but which it was the function of legitimate government, of good government, to "secure." Diderot adopted the Lockean theory of natural rights, and in his Encyclopédie article on "Droit naturel" he used the phrase "inalienable rights." 29 But Englishmen had already secured most of these. The Bill of Rights of December 16, 1689, extended those that Englishmen already enjoyed, by specifically guaranteeing such things as the right of petition and of trial by jury. It also forbade the imposition of excessive bail and forbade, too, any future attempt to dispense with the law of the land. 40 Thus did the Convention Parliament deal with the claims of overextended royal prerogative or, as President Nixon called it, "executive privilege." In this fashion the English Enlightenment made operative what the French Enlightenment was later to admire and hope to secure. In the article "Philosophe" in the Encyclopédie, the philosophes themselves defined what they meant by "philosophy." Like thousands of its sibling articles in that stimulating work, the article "Philosophe" was controversial. It stated a new philosophical goal (or, perhaps, only restated a very ancient one that is easy for philosophers to lose sight of). "Reason is to a philosopher," it declared, "what grace is to a Christian"—a rather impudent remark. "The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness.... Man is not a monster who should live only in the deeps of the sea or the depths of a f o r e s t . . . his needs and well-being engage him to live in society. . . . The philosopher, then, is an honest man who acts in all things according to reason, and who combines good morals and sociable qualities with a mind disposed toward reflection and preciseness."*1 This aspect of philosophy, the facet of its dealing with ethics and social philosophy, did indeed develop into a marked feature of French thinking, and I include it here as another characteristic of Enlightenment thought. We see it in Diderot, who said late in life that his greatest desire had been to write a systematic treatise on ethics (the responsibility, he said, had been too great and he

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had given it up); we see it in the books of Helvétius, which had such a great (and greatly unacknowledged) impact upon Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians in England; we see it in the writings of D'Holbach. And we see it in the pronounced humanitarianism of the Enlightenment movement. Now, the English had had a philosopher like that, and greatly influential he was, too, both at home and abroad. He was Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), whose collected works were published in 1711 under the title of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times and were so popular that they ran to a fifth edition by 1732. Shaftesbury, who had been educated under the supervision of John Locke, was also much influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, who, in their gentle way, might likewise be considered as part of the English Enlightenment. Shaftesbury was a moralist. His philosophy insisted upon the necessity of freedom for any kind of scientific, aesthetic, or political achievement; upon the social and moral instincts of man and upon the universal good; upon an optimistic view of the possibilities within any man, given the proper circumstances; and upon the close relationship uniting truth, beauty, and the good." Such views show him to be an aesthetician as well as a moralist, but he was a moralist most of all. This influence had made itself felt early in France. A translation of Shaftesbury's Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour was published in 1710. Diderot translated An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit in 1745, and Shaftesbury remained an abiding influence in Diderot's thought on eithics and especially in his thinking on aesthetics.33 In the article "Génie" (Genius) in the Encyclopédie, an article written by the poet Saint-Lambert, there is a passage extremely appreciative of Shaftesbury. 34 Altogether, the philosophy of the philosophes owed much in inspiration not only to Locke, but also to Shaftesbury, a leading figure in both the political and intellectual sides of the English Enlightenment. I shall terminate this enumeration of the characteristics of the French Enlightenment by alluding to the fact that the philosophes developed a sense of kindred feeling that was something like that of a political party. They knew one another. They interacted with one another. In fact, the Encyclopédie announced on its title page that it was done "by a Society of Men of Letters." Peter Gay has called them the Party of Humanity. He has also

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referred to the philosophes as constituting a kind of family—a happy analogy, because it allows for hearty family quarrels and for the antipathies, as well as the affection, of siblings and cousins. It is important to realize that such intellectual interaction— and personal contact—had occurred on the English scene in the seventeenth century. The fact that the Revolution against Charles I had settled so much and yet left a very considerable amount of unfinished business brought it about that the period of the Restoration, the generation between 1660 and 1688, was a happy-hunting time for intellectuals. It is conjectured that Locke knew personally the aged Hobbes; he certainly knew Newton and, as previously mentioned, was the director of Shaftesbury's education. All the members of the Royal Society knew one another: Locke and Newton, of course, and Christopher Wren, and a historian such as Bishop Burnet, the diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, a statistician in the person of William Petty, a demographer in John Graunt, a chemist-physicist in Robert Boyle, poets like Edmund Waller and John Dryden, astronomers like Halley and Flamsteed, the botanist Hans Sloane, the inventor Robert Hooke, and William P e n n . " In the realm of politics there was a brief period in England in 1687 and 1688 when men of every political stripe united in opposition to James II's extreme claims subvertive of the laws of England. 56 Clearly, England had its Party of Humanity too. The crisis once over and the Revolution safely and almost bloodlessly accomplished, England passed into a period of such stability and, on the whole, such conservatism, that it became easy to overlook the fact that the country had indeed had an Enlightenment, and that it was thereafter living serenely on its accumulated capital of political and intellectual achievements. Thus far my object has been to contend that the English did more than simply influence the Enlightenment—they had an Enlightenment. According to this analysis, the characteristics of the French Enlightenment that were also observable, and observable earlier, in England were natural religion; deism; the growth of philosophical materialism; the desire for legal religious toleration, for the spread of tolerance, and for freedom of the press; the intellectual revulsion against arbitrary imprisonment; the influence of Lord Bacon; the founding of scientific societies for the

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promotion of knowledge; the prestige of Newtonianism; the faith in reason; the sensationalist psychology; a liberal political theory; the "new" philosophy of Locke and Shaftesbury in its ethical and aesthetic implications; and, finally, a sense of kindred feeling which stoked the movement for enlightenment. Historians who fail to recognize the existence of a seventeenthcentury English Enlightenment will inevitably tend to interpret the whole global movement as somewhat smaller and more restricted than in fact it was. But historians seem to be changing in this regard. I believe that Professor Hatton and other London School of Economics scholars are beginning to speak of the existence of an English Enlightenment. Up to now, however, one cannot find—and I have looked hard to find them—books or articles devoted to a thoroughgoing discussion of whether or not there was an English Enlightenment in and of itself. I have found intimations of it when authors speak of English intellectual influences on the Continent, but it is hard to say how sharply and unambiguously these authors had in mind, over and above influences, a fully proportioned English Enlightenment as such." Henry Steele Commager, in his recent book, comes closest when he says, "We can date the Old World Enlightenment from the founding of the Royal Society... or perhaps from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687." But even Commager does not speak of an English Enlightenment; on the contrary, he remarks that "England was a bit outside the Enlightenment."®8 And Henry F. May, who does recognize that there was an English Enlightenment, speaks of it as "the Moderate English Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century" [emphasis mine]. 19 To posit the existence of an earlier Enlightenment in England has the merit of clearing up two historical points that could otherwise be termed paradoxical. The first is this: How does it happen that the Enlightenment in America shows so little evidence of having been much influenced by the Enlightenment in France? The second: How does it happen that English literature of the eighteenth century, a very flourishing and significant literature indeed, does not manifest the characteristics of agitation and turbulence that one would expect to find in literary works associated with an Enlightenment movement? The answer to the first question is in brief that the American Enlightenment found all the nourishment it needed in its English

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antecedents. Moreover, it distrusted the religious radicalism of the French movement. The brief answer to the second question is that the literature of eighteenth-century England was supported and sustained by an Enlightenment that, for the most part, had already occurred. With reference to the first question, it would be hard to find nowadays any American historian who would deny that the North American colonies experienced an Enlightenment, or who would deny that such ideas helped to inspire and foment the American Revolution. As Commager ebulliently remarks, "It was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but wrote them into law, crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work." Well and good. But where do we find the influence of the French Enlightenment in all this? Save for the knowledge of Montesquieu's writings, especially the Esprit des lots, it is hard to find traces of French influence in Revolutionary American political thought. 40 The influence of Rousseau in America was minimal, according to Paul M. Spurlin, and what there was of it began around 1789.41 The only reference in Jefferson's writing or correspondence to Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédte was to a second edition published in Lucca and available at Alexandria, Virginia. Jefferson was authorized by the Virginia Council in 1781 to purchase this set "for the use of the Public." The encyclopedia mentioned with great frequency in Jefferson's correspondence was not Diderot's Encyclopédte, but the later Encyclopédte méthodique, an altogether different (and lesser) work. 44 Nor did Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson ever act in France as though they were disciples come to sit at the feet of their masters. They treated the philosophes as peers, not as superiors. Both men were irritated by the complacent European assumption, imbibed from the writings of the Abbé Cornelius De Pauw, that "The whole human race is indubitably weakened and rendered degenerate in the new continent." 43 Species of animals likewise, according to the great French naturalist Buffon. Jefferson devoted a considerable portion of his Notes on the State of Virginia to confuting Buffon, and, in order to overwhelm his French confrere with evidence, went to great pains and expense to obtain the skeleton of a moose.44 If one examines the pamphlet literature written by Americans

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in the developing dispute with the mother country, once again one may well ask, where is the influence of French thought to be seen in these impressive documents? Not in Jonathan Mayhew's Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1750), "the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America." He himself declared that the great modern teachers of liberty were Bishop Hoadly, Algernon Sidney, Milton, and Locke.45 Not in James Otis's The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764). There the burden of the argument comes from Sir Edward Coke and his celebrated judgment in Bonham's Case (1610). Nor in A Vindication of the British Colonies (1765), where Otis relies on Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England had been published that same year. Not in Daniel Delany's Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (1765) or John Dickinson's The Late Regulations... Considered.*6 And when hostilities had started and Americans were considering whether to declare their independence, Tom Paine, in Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet of all (May 1776), spoke to the Americans not with the arguments of the French philosophes, but with the biblical story, from the First Book of Samuel, of how the Israelites sinned in desiring to have a king. Whence, then, did the colonists derive their ideology? From their own ancestral traditions, and from the English Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. Colonial thinkers hearkened back, as research regarding the books they purchased proves, to the martyred Algernon Sidney and his Discourses on Government; to Locke, of course, and to John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and the Independent Whig and Cato's Letters.*1 Most of all, though, it was simply English revolutions and English religious disputes, especially the complex influence of Puritanism, and English philosophy and American folkways—but not the French Enlightenment — that provided the Americans with their ideology.48 Let me now turn to the question of what might be termed paradoxical about the nature of eighteenth-century English literature. The Age of Addison, of Swift, of Pope, of Dr. Johnson, and of Edmund Burke is a great period in English letters, but its literature does not have the flavor of Enlightenment agitation. Consider, just as an exercise in comparative literature, the difference

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in tonality between the books written by these great authors and those written by Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, D'Holbach, and Raynal. The books of an Enlightenment movement carry with them an aura of dissonance and nonconformity and discontent and alienation. Enlightenment books are aggressive, though their aggressiveness and abrasiveness may be wreathed in the gracious rhetoric of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forms of discourse. They are challenging, they are pugnacious, they are provocative and provoking, and they are antiestablishment. In Enlightenment writings there is a prickliness and irritability ever close to the surface. But what of a literature written when the time of troubles is past? Of a literature that is free of the stultifications of censorship and the menace of arbitrary punishments; of a literature riding on the crest of an Enlightenment already achieved? This is a literature that can afford to be serene, sedate—and conservative. English eighteenth-century literature was written by enlightened men but it is not Enlightenment in its resonances. Swift is a satirist of overwhelming power, but it is not an Enlightenment trait to despair of the human race nor to think of men as Yahoos. Pope is a poet of infinite grace, but to preach in elegant heroic couplets that "One truth is clear: whatever is, is RIGHT" is not exactly an example of Enlightenment reaching out to new horizons. The formidable Dr. Johnson, "rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner," was an imposing man of letters, but he was also, as the Regius Professor of History at Oxford says of him, a "high-church Tory bigot." 49 Scarcely a man eager to hold out his hand to change. In eighteenth-century English literature we find urbanity, worldliness (as in Lord Chesterfield or Lord Hervey), some cynicism (as in Chesterfield and, say, in Mandeville), but no manifestations of Enlightenment ferment (save for the deists) until late in the century—with men like Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Tom Paine, Jeremy Bentham, and William Godwin. Hume frequently spoke with scorn—in his private correspondence with fellow Scots, to be sure—of the intellectual level of all Englishmen of his generation. He made only one exception: Edward Gibbon. What was the difference: What had happened? The answer is that the English Enlightenment had occurred in a relatively short time and with such decisiveness that no further agitation seemed to the English to be necessary or even very desirable. 50 Whereas

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the French man of letters had the sensation, throughout the century, of having to live in a kind of pressure cooker, the Englishman quickly accustomed himself to all the considerable gains he had achieved and did not particularly yearn for more. English society became quite conservative. The successes of the English Enlightenment had the paradoxical effect of inducing not only stability but complacency. If indeed there was an English Enlightenment, occurring mostly in the seventeenth century, how does it happen that that fact has not become one of the commonplaces of historical knowledge and of the vocabulary of historians? The subject invites research. I suspect that the word crept into English from the German Aufklárung, perhaps as a result, when Kant's thought eventually began to be studied by the English, of Kant's essay on Was ist Aufklárung? Therefore, to insular taste, the word always bore the stigma of being a foreign importation. As recently as 1960, Alfred Cobban, a very sagacious historian, observed that "The term Enlightenment is hardly naturalized in English."51 What had really begun in England came to seem to conservative Englishmen abhorrently foreign, and they were in no mood to claim having had any part in its genesis. Even if Englishmen of the eighteenth century were aware that a special, intellectual, "philosophical" movement was going on in the world, they were happy to attribute it to the French, a nation to which they were delighted to condescend. "Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation," —it is Edmund Burke who is speaking—"thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers.... We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers."58 This hostile attitude toward the idea of Enlightenment was exacerbated during the French Revolution by fear of the Jacobins and of Napoleon, and made paranoid by the suspicion—I am quoting from a book published in 1798 —that the French Revolution was the result of "a formal and systematic conspiracy against Religion. . . formed and zealously prosecuted by Voltaire, d'Alembert, and Diderot, assisted by Frederick II, King of Prussia. " s s Anti-French animosities and, later, anti-Enlightenment Romanticism explain the tardiness and reluctance with which

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English critics and historians allude to the term. The Oxford, English Dictionary gives a surprisingly late date—1865—for the first year in which the word "enlightenment" (in the sense of a period in history) is found. Nor is the connotation flattering. In a book called The Secret of Hegel, the author refers sarcastically to "Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms dear to Enlightenment." 54 The great editor and Gladstonian liberal, Lord Morley, in his interestingly written and still useful Diderot and the Encyclopedists (1878) does not, so far as I can find, use the word "Enlightenment" one single time in his two volumes. And is it not striking that the monumental Cambridge Modern History, planned by Lord Acton and published between 1904 and 1910, has no mention of the Enlightenment in its table of contents, its text, or its index? I have just quoted the Oxford English Dictionary's example of the first use of the term in English. Their own definition of the word "Enlightenment," which was first published in 1887, is, with word order somewhat transposed, the definition they are using today. In the third edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, published in 1973, it appears as follows: "Enlightenment: Shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc., applied especially to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century." No wonder Professor Cobban remarked that the term "Enlightenment" is hardly naturalized in English. No wonder that I could begin this paper by making the observation that there is something anomalous in the way in which historians have treated the role of England in the Enlightenment. NOTES 1. "Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit" (Immanuel Kant, "Was ist Aufklärung?" [1784]). 2. Jean Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l'Europe des Lumières (Paris, 1952); Robert Howard Lord, The Second Partition of Poland (Cambridge, Mass., 1915); Grzegorz Leopold Seidler, "The Polish Contribution to the Age of Enlightenment," Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, XVIII (1971), 1-31. 3. Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958), pp. 37-85, 154-200, especially 84-85; Jean Sarrailh,

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L'Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1954). 4. George Barany, "Hoping Against Hope: The Enlightened Age in Hungary," American Historical Review, LXXVI(1971), 319-357. Marc Raeff, "The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment," in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. J . G. Garrard (Oxford, 1973), pp. 25-47; Raeff, "Les Slaves, les Allemands et les 'Lumières,'" Canadian Slavic Studies, I (1967), 521-551. 5. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966-1969), II, 332. See also David Daiches, The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (London, 1964); Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London, 1976); Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Scottish Enlightenment," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967), 16551658; and Roger L. Emerson, "Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century, 1690-1800," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLXVII (1977), 453-474. 6. Bernard Bailyn, "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America," American Historical Review, LXVII (1961-1962), 351; see also Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), passim. Consult also Gay, The Enlightenment, II, 555-563. 7. Robert R. Palmer, "Turgot: Paragon of the Continental Enlightenment," fournal of Law and Economics, X I X (1976), 608. 8. Giorgio Tonelli, "The 'Weakness' of Reason in the Age of Enlightenment," Diderot Studies XIV (Geneva, 1971), 217-244: "there are at least two basically different Enlightenments: the one dominant first in England and Holland, and later in France, Italy and Spain; the other dominant in Germany and Scandinavia" (ibid., 219-220). Tonelli also alludes to "the Anglo-French Enlightenment" (ibid., 222, 239, 242243). Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment (New York, 1965), pp. 36, 39. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), p. 132: "In America the skeptical Parisian Enlightenment had a far less important influence than its moderate, rationalist, English predecessor"; also May, Enlightenment in America, pp. 106, 159; and May, "The Problem of the American Enlightenment," New Literary History, I (1970), 209, 213. D. H. Meyer, "The Uniqueness of the American Enlightenment," American Quarterly, X X V I I I (1976), 167, observes that "the English Enlightenment was more moderate than the French." 9. See J . S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (Oxford, 1960), pp. 85-168; Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1971), pp. 206-230. 10. Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton, 1938), passim. 11. Norman L. Torrey, Voltaire and the English Deists (New Haven, 1930), passim, especially pp. 2-4, 202-203. 12. Franco Venturi, "The European Enlightenment," in his Italy and

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the Enlightenment (New York, 1972), pp. 5-8, this quotation p. 8; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Beacon paperback ed., pp. 171-177, especially p. 174). For the influence of Toland abroad, see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 49-55, 57-62, 64-67. 13. John Pappas, "Voltaire et la guerre civile philosophique," Reime d'histoire littéraire de la France, LXI (1961), 525-549. 14. In the 1760s Diderot became fascinated with Hobbes's philosophy. See Diderot to Naigeon (?), April 1772 (Denis Diderot, Correspondence, ed. George Roth and Jean Varlott, 16 vols. [Paris, 1955-1970], XII, 45-46); also Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York, 1972), pp. 379-380, 568, 833 n. 49; LelandJ. Thielemann, "Thomas Hobbes dans l'Encyclopédie," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, LI (1951), 333346; Thielemann, "Diderot and Hobbes," Diderot Studies, II (1952), 221-278. 15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chap, iii, sec. 6. For example, Diderot alludes to this passage in his Encyclopédie article "Locke, philosophie de" (Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Varloot [Paris, 1975-], VII, 714. 16. Lester G. Crocker, "John Toland et le matérialisme de Diderot," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, LIII (1953), 289-295; Paolo Casini, "Toland e l'attività délia materia," Rixnsta Critica diStoria délia Filosofia, XXII (1967), 24-53. See also G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1950), chap, vii: "John Toland and the Rise of Deism." For a very illuminating discussion of Toland's influence on Enlightenment thought, see Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, pp. 49-67; also Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), pp. 210238. 17. See Robert Shackleton, "Censure and Censorship: Impediments to Free Publication in the Age of the Enlightenment," Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, New Series, No. 6 (December 1973), pp. 25-41. 18. See A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th ed. (London, 1920), pp. 256-259; Dudley J. Medley, A Student's Manual of English Constitutional History, 6th ed. (Oxford, 1925), p. 481. 19. Beatrice F. Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789 According to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934), pp. 92-93, 160. 20. Ernst Cassirer, in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 15 vols. (New York, 1930-1935), V, 551, s.v. "Enlightenment." 21. Wilson, Diderot, pp. 132, 137, 187-190, 244; Howard B. White, "The Influence of Bacon on the Philosophes," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, XXVII (1963), 1849-1869. 22. J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel (New York, 1960), pp. 186-187. 23. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 12, 13. 24. Ibid., p. 99. Regarding Locke's influence, see also (and espe-

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cially) Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from. Montesquieu to Lesstng (New Haven, 1954), pp. 42-43. For the great influence of Pierre Coste's translation (1700) of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, see Gabriel Bonno, La culture et la civilisation britanniques devant l'opinion française de la Paix d'Utrecht aux "Lettres Philosophiques" {1713-1734) (Philadelphia, 1948), pp. 85-92. 25. See Peter Gay, Voltaire's Politics (Princeton, 1959); Arthur M. Wilson, "Why Did the Political Theory of the Encyclopedists not Prevail?," French Historical Studies, I (1958-1960), 283-294; Geschichtsschreibung und Staatsauffassung in der französischen Enzyklopädie (Wiesbaden, 1956); John Lough, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert (London, 1968), pp. 424-462; Jacques Proust, Diderot et V "Encyclopédie" (Paris, 1962), especially pp. 341-502; Jeroom Vercruysse, Bibliographie descriptive des écrits du baron d'Holbach (Geneva, 1971); Virgil W. Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy: Its Background and Development (Geneva, 1956). On Diderot, besides Proust and Lough, see Paul Vernière, ed., Diderot: Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris, 1956); Arthur M. Wilson, "The Development and Scope of Diderot's Political Thought," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, X X V I I (1963), 1871-1900; Yves Benot, Diderot: de l'athéisme à l'anticolonialisme (Paris, 1970); Anthony Strugnell, Diderot's Politics (The Hague, 1973); Paolo Alatri, Voltaire, Diderot e il "Partito Filosofico " (Messina-Florence, 1965). 26. Owen Ruffhead, in the Monthly Review, X X X I X (1768), 545. 27. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Varloot, V, 537-539. See also John Lough, Encyclopédie of Diderot. . ., pp. 424-462; and Wilson, Diderot, pp. 142-143, 154, 489, 753 n. 30. For an extreme example of Louis XV's assertion of absolutist power, see his scolding of the Parlement of Paris at the "séance de la flagellation," March 3, 1766 (Jules Flammermont and Maurice Tourneux, eds., Remontrances du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. [Paris, 1888-1898], II, 556-558). 28. Eberhard Weis, Geschichtsschreibung und Staatsauffassung in der französischen Encyklopädie (Wiesbaden, 1956) (Veröffentlichen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Bd. 14, Abteilung Universalgeschichte), 176. 29. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Varloot, VII, 28. 30. Carolyn A. Edie, "Revolution and the Rule of Law: The End of the Dispensing Power, 1689," Eighteenth-Century Studies, X (19761977), 434-450. 31. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris, 1875-1877), XVI, 274-277. This article freely plagiarized an earlier anonymous essay first printed in 1743. For a complete discussion, see Herbert Dieckmann, ed., Le Philosophe Texts and Interpretations (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, No. 18 [St. Louis, 1948]). 32. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 128-132. 33. Wilson, Diderot, pp. 50-52, 57, 535, 538, 757 n. 21. See also

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Paolo Casini, "Diderot e Shaftesbury," Giornale Critico delta Filosofia Italiana, X X X I X (1960), 253-273; Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens, Ohio, 1967), pp. ix-xi; Dorothy B. Schlegel, "Diderot as the Transmitter of Shaftesbury's Romanticism," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, X X V I I (1963), 14571478; Schlegel, Shaftesbury and the French Deists (Chapel Hill, 1956); Wladislaw Folkierski, "Comment Lord Shaftesbury a-t-il conquis Diderot?" in Studi in onore di Carlo Pelligrini (Turin, 1964), pp. 319346; Gordon B. Walters, Jr., The Significance of Diderot's "Essai sur le mérite et la vertu" (Chapel Hill, 1971). For an analysis of Shaftesbury's aesthetics, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 313328. For the influence of the Cambridge Platonists on Shaftesbury, see Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (Edinburgh and Austin, Texas, 1953), chap. vi. 34. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Assézat and Tourneux, XV, 39. 35. For annual lists of members of the Royal Society, see The Record of the Royal Society of London, 4th ed. (London, 1940), pp. 375-516; also Sir Henry Lyons, The Royal Society, 1660-1940 (Cambridge, 1944), passim. 36. For a study of the "multimedia" by which this consensus was brought about, see the most interesting article by Lois G. Schwoerer, "Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688-89," American Historical Review, L X X X I I (1977), 843-874. 37. For examples, see Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1968), p. 56: "Britain and France together provided the main impetus behind the Enlightenment"; Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (London, 1960), p. 7: "The term 'Enlightenment' is hardly naturalized in English. This is curious, because the intellectual and moral revolution which it describes perhaps obtained its most widespread acceptance and exercised its most lasting influence in Great Britain and the English-speaking world"; Thomas J . Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame, Ind., 1977), p. xv, speaks of "the traditional (and, I think, accurate) dates of the Enlightenment which begins with the English Glorious Revolution and ends with the outbreak of the French"; Crane Brinton, in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York, 1967), II, 523, s.v. "Enlightenment": "The English, with Bacon, Locke, Newton, and the early deists like Toland and Tindal, have some claim to being the originators, the adventurers in ideas which the French did no more than spread"; Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1971), p. 17: "The general view now held would be that the English influence is very important, especially upon France who introduced it throughout Europe. It is thought, however, that in doing this, France enhanced her own importance." Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (New York, 1941), p. 156, comes the closest of all: "Moreover, by the middle of the eighteenth century, after the passing of New-

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ton, Locke, and the deists, it was no longer England but France which was conducting the main speculative attack. . . . " However, the remarks of all these authors are, I think, rather incidental and are tangential to the conception that there was, by itself, a distinct and complex English Enlightenment occurring most in the seventeenth century. 38. Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), pp. 4, 242. 39. May, The American Enlightenment, p. 350. 40. Regarding Montesquieu, see Paul M. Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760-1801 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940), passim. For the incidence of French Enlightenment authors in colonial American libraries, see the tabulations in David Lundberg and Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," American Quarterly, X X V I I I (1976), following p. 271. 41. Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760-1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), pp. 101, 113, and passim. 42. Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomasfefferson (Princeton, 1950-), IV, 168, 211; V, 15, 311; VI, 25. For the Encyclopédie méthodique, see ibid., VI, 258 [March or April 1783] and the numerous references indexed in The Papers of Thomas fefferson: Index, Volumes 7-12 (Princeton, 1958), and ibid., Volumes 13-18 (Princeton, 1973), s.v. "Encyclopédie méthodique." 43. Corneille De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l'histoire de l'espèce humain, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Berlin, 1777), I, 259. Apparently Franklin himself told Jefferson of a dinner given by Franklin to the Abbé Raynal and a company of other Frenchmen and Americans: "The abbé set off on one of his usual oratorical tirades on the degeneration of men and animals in America. The host, good-humored as ever, suggested that the matter be tested empirically: 'Let us try this question by the fact before us.' He asked his guests to stand up, and it turned out that all the Americans were tall and well built, and all the French singularly tiny: the abbé himself was 'a mere shrimp' " (Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973], p. 242 and n. 3). 44. Details in Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, pp. 264-266; see also Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 17351789 (Chapel Hill, 1956), p. 322. 45. Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I, 209; for the whole sermon, see ibid., 212-247. 46. For these pamphlets, see Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 419-482, 554-579, 608-658, 669-691. For American political writing from 1765 to 1776, see Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New York, 1953), chap, xii, pp. 326-361. 47. For Trenchard and Gordon, see David L. Jacobson, ed., The

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English Libertarian Heritage from, the Writings ofJohn Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in "The Independent Whig" and "Cato's Letters" (Indianapolis, 1965). Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic, p. 141: "No one can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato's Letters rather than Locke's Civil Government was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period." See also Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 115-125; and May, The Enlightenment in America, pp. 38-39, 41, 156. 48. The slight influence of French ideas in America before 1776 is emphasized by May, "Problem of the American Enlightenment," p. 210; May, The Enlightenment in America, pp. 25, 41, 360; see also Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York, 1976), pp. 104-105. 49. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (New York, 1963), p. xii. 50. Save for the English deists; see Margaret C. Jacob, "Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment," Eighteenth-Century Studies, XI (1977-1978), 1-25. 51. See n. 37, above. 52. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Dolphin Book C246, 1961), p. 99. 53. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (New York, 1798), p. 391. Robison's book was republished in paperback (Boston, 1967), under the auspices of the John Birch Society; this quotation, p. 297. 54. I cite the second edition: James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (Edinburg, 1898), p. xxxii.

II CRA Wv. RAMSEY: NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD DEBATE A r t h u r J . Slavin

1 My subject is the old debate over the nature of the Imperial Constitution before 1775. Few questions in English or American history have attracted the attention of a more distinguished lot of historians than the many Imperialists, Progressives and NeoWhigs who have kept at the center of their concern related issues of constitutional doctrine, political unrest, and the ideology of rights and liberties. Coke had anticipated the debate to which I want to draw attention without wandering too widely in the bogs of revisionist historiography, when he said the power of Parliament was so transcendent and absolute as to be unconfined either for causes or persons. Charles Howard Mcllwain utterly rejected this doctrine because he found evidence against a legislative sovereignty of the British Parliament over the remote dominions. Robert Livingstone Schuyler firmly upheld the Imperialist thesis of H. L. Osgood: that in law, if not in fact, parliamentary authority over the English in America was as complete as ever it was in any place within England. 1 29

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The disputants levied contributions from British and American legal precedents, statute books, charters, treaties, and pamphlets, reaching back to the Anglo-Norman period and coming forward to the 1929 Statute of Westminster. Mcllwain made much of Calvin's Case, a suit so familiar in textbooks and collections of documents that every English school child knew it. He gave as much space to Craw v. Ramsey, a suit as obscure as Calvin's Case was well-known. Why he should have done so I hope to show in the main part of my text. But first I should put before you a few commonplace sayings in constitutional and legal history, with some commentary. The first of these is that in England there is much constitutional law but no constitution. The second is that English constitutional law lies in a province of its own, beyond private law and ordinary public law. Private law is such that the state has no direct interest in its chief matters: the definition and regulation of torts, contracts, family agreements, and the descent of property. The state has direct concern for public law because that law defines and regulates the mutual obligations of government and subject or citizen, in taxation, military service, the power of arrest, and other delicate matters. One's standpoint determines how the rules are regarded, but even the rules of public law are usually distinguished from constitutional rules. 2 Constitutional rules regulate the state itself and also its agencies. They arise in the need to settle disputes about structure, function, and relationship in government.® Among the problems dealt with are these: How many members make up the Commons? What powers lie in the sovereign's grasp? Who must yield in a dispute between cabinet and Parliament? Maitland spoke wisely therefore, when he said the heart of constitutional law and of constitutional history is the effort to make clear "structure and the broader rules which regulate function."* Unfortunately, when we seek to apply the commonplace distinctions to the actual situation at a point in time, troubles appear. The more remote the point in time the more must we resort to private law to determine public, even constitutional, questions. In the absence of a code or written constitution, and given the meagerness of public law, the rules are obscure. Consider for a moment rules regulating relations between Brit-

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ain and the plantations in America toward the end of Charles II's reign. One finds few relevant statutes. A few cases dominate the sources.5 The dicta of judges, some treaties and customs, and the observations of statesmen are merely useful secondary materials. 6 They cannot command our attention, which turns to Godfrey v. Dixon,1 Calvin's Case8 and Craw v. Ramsey.9 Statute did not define "alien" and "subject" with the precision Magna Carta used to require kings to hold pleas in a fixed place. 10 We look to Calvin's Case to know the rules determining the most fundamental relationship between James I's English and Scottish subjects. Because he was unable to get from the Commons all he wanted for his Scottish adherents who came southward with him, James promoted a collusive suit to determine the rights of the postnati.11 Mcllwain fully grasped that great questions had their resolution in petty cases, when the issue in hand was whether a parliament at Westminster had legislative powers in George Ill's overseas dominions. Nowhere else could he find fundamental notions defined: alien, subject, domicile, nationality. Where the ideas were defined, they were embedded in the language and vocabulary of feudalism. The concept of allegiance governed the others,12 and understanding allegiance required a journey into the darkest thickets of feudalism, into a veritable selva oscura, where the praise of one's colleagues gave immediate courage but little enduring help.1® Yet Mcllwain was certainly right to follow the path leading from Calvin's Case to Craw v. Ramsey and to set the one beside the other in his canon of cases. Now, I must say why, in the hope of convincing you to apply to the obscure case what Coke said of the celebrated one: "The least for the value. . . but the weightiest for the consequents." 14 2 In Calvin's Case the judges in Exchequer Chamber reached this question: is the son of a Scot born in Scotland after the accession of James I to the English throne an alien to England? 15 The Commissioners appointed to draw up an Instrument of Union in Parliament (1606) had distinguished between the postnati and antenati. They proposed to deal with the antenati by a statute of naturalization. But they intended to seek a declaration that the

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postnati were in fact naturalized under the common law.16 To this there was great opposition in the Commons. Consider that Philip and Mary had left a son who became king of Spain and of England. Were his Spanish subjects in the same case? If yes, how far could they claim the rights of Englishmen? To the point of inheriting lands? Of holding office or a seat in the Commons? Of making a majority to overthrow the Reformation? Say what the lawyers might, the Commons would never say yes to such things. 17 Hence, the resort to Calvin's Case, in which a mere boy postnatus claimed the right to some land in Shoreditch, in an action of novel disseisin against two English brothers. A dozen judges, among them Coke, Bacon, and Ellesmere, spread their learning at large on every page of Coke's vast report, in giving judgment for the boy and hence for all postnati. 18 There were only two dissenting voices. What the majority found was that the protection of the English law followed from allegiance, which was the obedience a subject owed to his sovereign. This flowed from a subject to the natural capacity of the lord and was the residue of personal homage and liege loyalty which had been at the heart of the feudal idea of dominion. Those who gave allegiance were of two sorts: born and made (natus et datus). But they owed it equally and benefited from it without regard to territorial divisions. For allegiance was univocal. Hence no person born in any territory of a sovereign lord after the assumption of that sovereignty could be an alien in any part of that lord's dominions. The laws of the several dominions remained separate. So might their legislatures. But allegiance was owed to none of these, only to the king. 19 This decision left unclarified the status of the antenati. They had been excluded from the collusive suits, perhaps because even James I could not think they had a case at common law. The king had mercilessly harangued the Commons, however, expressing his deep frustration over the treatment of his fellow Scots who had come southward with him. He had even gone so far as to say he could fully naturalize by prerogative instruments, because rex est lex,20 a point Coke had refuted amply, but only in an obiter dictum,. The issue had not been reached in Calvin's Case, but Sir Edward took the occasion to fully develop his theory of limitations on the rights conveyable by patent. What the king could do was to make an alien a denizen. 11

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Denizens by patent did differ from naturalized aliens who had the benefit of statute. The former could gain, hold, and transmit property to any heir born after the grant. They lacked all rights in public law. Moreover, the restorative effects of the grant lacked retroactivity; issue born before the grant were excluded from inheritance for the good reason that they could make no pedigree to one then at law an alien. There remained an impediment in their "legal blood." They were in the same case as the antenati excluded from the rule of decision in Calvin's Case.*1 Of that none could have doubt, although there could now be great doubt as to how far the effects of naturalization by statute would carry." The cloud over the picture of Union led Mcllwain straight to Craw v. Ramsey.24 But he knew nothing of the earlier cases of Fosters. Ramsey2S or Collingwoodv. Pace.16 Hence he misunderstood the significance of the latter case. 17 1 think he did so for another reason: because he had resort to it as a proof-text for his ideas about the imperial connection in the 1770s, in much the same way that James Otis, James Wilson, and John Adams used Calvin's Case to claim independence from the control of Parliament. 2 8 This together with his ignorance of the full range of Reports on Craw v. Ramsey gave Mcllwain a very poor understanding of the issues and the decision. 29 3 The following chart shows well enough the line of Robert Ramsey I. 50 He was a Scot antenatus born long before 1603. He sired four antenati sons, in this order: Robert II, Nicholas, John, and George. Robert II's three daughters were Scots by birth. The two sons of Nicholas were native Englishmen, however, as was John Ramsey II, the son of George. 41 You must keep this in mind about Patrick and John II. John I had been a close follower of James VI in Scotland. He had been knighted there, before being raised to the peerage in England as Viscount Haddington in 1606 and then being further promoted to be Earl of Holderness in 1621. As Sir John had grown richer, amassing much land and other wealth, he had also been naturalized by a private bill enacted at Westminster in 1604." The like favor had been shown to George in 1610, well before the

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in England, improvements that could produce results in six figures. The government's reticence on Scotland does not mean that Scotland was not on the mind of some at the treasury—particularly John Scrope, with his long experience north of the border. The Scottish revelations at the end of 1732 may well have been the final blow that sent the government lurching forward with its excise burden. Although rumors of an excise scheme had been around all through 1732, although the well-informed could report that it was definite in October 114 —the month when the opposition press opened its attack on "General Excise,"116 although John Randolph arrived with the Virginia petitions early in November,11® the treasury did not begin to make any concrete plans until December 1732. The years of preparation some historians have imagined were largely psychological. On 5 December 1732, Scrope, apparently on his own authority, wrote to the customs board in Edinburgh for accounts of the gross and net proceeds of the duty on tobacco and wine for seven years. On 12 December, he was ordered by the treasury board to get rather fuller accounts from the English and Scottish commissioners. That order of 12 December is the first formal indication that anything approaching an excise scheme was discussed at the treasury board. 1 1 ' Only after the receipt of those accounts at the end of the month and in January could Walpole and Scrope begin detailed work on the scheme. Scrope was noted as the great legislative draftsman of his day and probably wrote the bill. Walpole's working papers of this time are rather those of one drafting a speech or pamphlet on a controversial subject. 118 The papers also show that Walpole consulted a few outsiders who advised him against the excise scheme —including an anonymous merchant 119 and Sir Richard Lane, former Bristol merchant and proministerial M.P. for Worcester, who liked the warehouse scheme but thought that excise administration "seems unnecessary and impracticable" and "Will certainly disoblige—so that we shall lose our Elections."110 The long delays between the leaking of the excise proposal in early 1732 and the actual introduction of the scheme in March 1733 gave its enemies more than enough time to concert their attacks. Sir James Lowther was spreading a hostile word in the northwest in March 1732, and the first of Pulteney's hostile pamphlets came out in June. However, the concerned journalistic

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attack only started in November, with a flood of pamphlets following in the new year.1*1 For both the political and economic historian, a most interesting feature of the opposition was the flood of letters, memorials, etc. received by M.P.'s from their constituents, asking them to oppose the excise scheme. Paul Langford has published a list of fifty-four constituencies sending such instructions to their members, and perhaps five more can be added to his list.1** Langford adds, "The instructions against the Jew Bill of 1753, the petitions and instructions following the loss of Minorca in 1756, the petitions and addresses associated with the Wilkes and reform agitations of the sixties and seventies were scarcely on this scale." However, Langford's comparisons are all with political questions important in London, but not matters that would affect ordinary shopkeeper voters the way an excise might. If we want an apter comparison, we have only to look back a few years in the journals of the House of Commons: between 18 February and 24 April 1730, petitions were presented to the house from shopkeepers in 79 different communities protesting against the unfair competition of hawkers and peddlers; a further 25 were presented in 1731 and two more in 1732. About half the places petitioning against excise had earlier petitioned against peddling, but petitions against peddling were received from sixty-two communities that did not petition against excise. The sixty-two were for the most part small places, but they included Berwick-on-Tweed, Cambridge, Derby, Durham, Halifax, Hereford, Hertford, Leeds, Lincoln, Plymouth, Preston, Salisbury, and Wakefield. 1 * 3 This antipeddler agitation shows that there was already in existence in the mercantile community a network of communication that could be utilized for political action. (There was a lot of petitioning to the Commons on other subjects ca. 1730-1732, but none on the scale of the antipeddler agitation.) The list of places that petitioned on peddling, but not on excise, also suggests that the antiexcise hysteria in the country was not as frenetic as the London publicists tried to make it. Whether indifference, proministerial sentiment, or local controlling political influences kept those sixty-two places quiet, the shopkeepers of the interior were not as a class totally swept into the antiexcise furor. In the larger port towns, particularly those connected with the wine and tobacco trades, there was more frenzy and unanimity.

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London, of course, took the lead, but the other important tobacco ports—Bristol, Liverpool, and Whitehaven, in particular—joined in. Only Scotland was strangely, perhaps guiltily, silent.124 In the English ports, economic motives were mixed with political. The Walpole regime was not popular in the large port towns, as became all too evident a few years later in the Jenkins' Ear agitation and riots. As the French minister in London reported to the minister of foreign affairs, " . . . si l'on en Excepte les Directeurs de la Compagnie de Commerce, toute la Cité de Londres est generalement Indisposée, pour ne pas dire plus, contre la Cour et contre Son Gouvernement." , , s Lord Stair made this much more explicit when he warned the queen about the unwisdom of the excise: "he [Walpole] is hated by the city of London, because he never did anything for the trading part of it, nor aimed at any interest of theirs but a corrupt influence over the directors and governors of the great moneyed c o m p a n i e s . I n the intense hostility of the larger ports to the excise scheme, we must see both this political antipathy of an alienated urban population and the calculations of merchants and shopkeepers who knew when their interest was affected. At Bristol, the mayor was Lyonel Lyde, a prominent Virginia merchant. When news was received in early January of the impending excise scheme, both the Society of Merchant Venturers and the Common Council of the town adopted resolutions against it and sent these to the two members for the town. One of these was John Scrope, the secretary to the treasury, from whom they could expect little, but the other was Sir Abraham Elton, the younger, who had a long family association with the tobacco trade, and who was much more sympathetic. On the eve of the introduction of the bill in March, the council and the Merchant Venturers shared the costs of a delegation sent to London to lobby against it." 7 At Liverpool, the merchants met in January and not only adopted resolutions against excise but also "have written to most of the Towns in that County desiring their Friends to make early Application to every Member of Parliament they have the least Pretension to ask a Favour from, to oppose every Attempt of a n y . . . Extension of the Excise Laws." In February, the Liverpool town council wrote to their members to this effect. 1 " At Whitehaven, the situation was more complex, because the

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town was not a parliamentary borough. Its principal landlord, Sir James Lowther, was member for the county. He, it will be remembered, had written in alarm about the scheme a year in advance and feared that Walpole only wanted to abolish the existing land tax in order to institute a new and reformed one, in which the northern counties would pay a higher assessment. Even while opposing the scheme, he was not above publicizing his interpretation of it, in hopes that both together would depress land values so that he could buy more cheaply. 1,9 When the concerted opposition became intense in January, Lowther (who was also corresponding with Liverpool) sent his agent Spedding a letter to be shown to the justices at the next quarter sessions and suggested that a delegation of Whitehaven merchants lobby at the sessions. He also sent printed ballads and suggested that the Whitehaven merchants go en masse to Cockermouth (nearby parliamentary borough) and join the burgesses there in letters to the members and the duke of Somerset. Spedding attended the sessions and managed things well, for letters against the excise were eventually sent by the justices and other gentlemen of the county, as well as by the burgesses of Cockermouth and the merchants of Whitehaven. 130 The chief burden of opposition, however, fell on the Londoners. Toward the end of November the tobacco merchants met and resolved to organize to fight the excise. On 8 December, the wine importers met and resolved to do the same, and agreed to levy a contribution of 6d. per pipe on all wine imported after 1 January for their lobbying expenses.151 To maximize their effectiveness, however, a broader appeal was needed. On 22 December 300-400 "merchants, traders and citizens" of London, Whig and Tory, Anglican, Dissenter, and Papist, attended a meeting at the Swan Tavern in Cornhill and chose a committee of twenty-five to solicit the members for the city and other places against the excise. This committee appears a most interesting group, even though all its members cannot be identified. There was a strong representation of wine importers: Sir William Chapman, baronet, who presided; Alderman George Champion, Alderman Robert Godschall, Robert Willimot, Daniel Lambert, Samuel Wilson, William Cleaver, and George Stanford. The tobacco trade was less strongly represented by three importers (Samuel Hyde, Samuel Haswell, and Thomas Hyam) and three manufac-

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turers (John Bosworth, Benjamin [?] Bradley, and Joseph Dash). There was a strong element of prominent city Tories: Godschall, Willimot, Lambert, Marshall, and Lockwood, all of whom were future M.P.'s and all but the last future lord mayors of London. 1,1 That there were not more prominent names from the tobacco importers suggests that some elements in the trade (noticeably the Scots and the Quakers) had doubts about being too conspicuous followers of Perry and Hyde in what was bound to be most distasteful to their correspondents in America. Nevertheless, early in January, the tobacco merchants met and raised £130 in subscriptions and agreed to use for the antiexcise cause the proceeds of their long-standing 3d. per hogshead "political fund." 1 " At a similar meeting on 5 (?) January, the tobacconists joined the fray, appointing a committee of their own. 1 ' 4 All through January and February, the tension mounted, with the press and newsletter writers reporting a constant stream of remonstrances from the country and delegations of London and Southwark merchants in long rows of coaches waiting on the speaker or this or that M.P. While pamphlets poured from the press and rumors chased rumors that the excise scheme was dropped or that tobacco would come forward without wine, 185 Walpole, Scrope, and their unknown aides worked at their own pace drafting the bill. Gradually, everyone perceived that the battle would have to be fought out in the House of Commons. There were at this time only five M.P.'s who had any sort of personal involvement in the tobacco trade: Micajah Perry, M.P. for London, a great Virginia merchant; Edward Tucker, M.P. for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, a smaller Virginia merchant; Daniel Campbell of Shawfield, M.P. for Glasgow, a former Virginia merchant; Sir Abraham Elton the younger, M.P. for Bristol, an occasional tobacco merchant; and Robert Bristow, Clerk of the Green Cloth, M.P. for Winchelsea, grandson of a Virginia merchant from whom he had inherited an estate there. 156 Tucker, who was a local political ally of Bubb Dodington, a junior treasury lord, was characteristically absent from the excise debates and voting in March, but eventually voted against excise in April. Campbell and Bristow were inveterate supporters of government and voted for the scheme. 157 That left only Elton and Perry to fight against it in Parliament, and Elton's ineffectiveness let the chief burden fall on Perry. He was the head of the

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greatest Virginia house in London, founded by his grandfather in the reign of Charles II. Almost from the time he succeeded his father and grandfather in 1720-1721, he was recognized as a leading figure in the Virginia trade, being elected virtually perpetual treasurer (head) of the committee of Virginia and Maryland merchants. 138 Unlike his father and grandfather, he was attracted to the public life of the city and in 1727 was elected M.P. for London in the government interest. By 1729 he had drifted into opposition along with John Barnard and the other London popular antiministerialists. He was an exceptionally active M.P., speaking on almost every issue affecting America and serving on numerous select committees. His opposition to the excise bill was both the zenith of his political career and the beginning of his commercial downfall. Next to nothing was said about the excise from the government side when Parliament convened in January, though Barnard and other opposition figures used the occasion of the debate on the address to attack the idea of excise. On 6 February, the government began the process of having the house call for accounts on tobacco, wine, coffee, tea, and the like, a necessary first step in the legislative process. These accounts started coming in on 25 February. Not till 7 March was the government ready to move that on 14 March the House should "resolve itself into a Committee of the whole House, to consider of the most proper Methods for the better Security and Improvement of the Duties and Revenues already charged upon. . . Tobacco and Wines."1®9 When the matter finally came up for discussion in the committee of the whole on the fourteenth, Walpole in his very long speech concentrated heavily upon the colonial and administrative aspects of the problem. He discussed the distress of the planters and the degree to which they had suffered at the hand of their mercantile correspondents in England "who from being their servants, are become their tyrants." He then went on to discuss ways in which the crown was cheated by frauds at weighing inward and outward and by exporting stalks and scraps as good tobacco. The principal reply was made by Micajah Perry who defended the honor of the tobacco merchants, particularly the commission merchants. If the planters knew distress, "the hardships the factors [commission merchants] labor under, are by much the most numerous and most grievous." If the scheme were

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adopted, the commission merchants would have to give up trade and then the planters would be truly distressed with so few ships to take away their tobacco. After a long and not very enlightening debate, the customs commissioners were called in and, through John Hill, Walpole's manager on the board, answered factual questions. Late that night, the government's excise resolutions for tobacco were accepted by the committee of the whole, 265-204. Two days later, when the committee's report was presented to the house, a motion to bring in a tobacco bill as recommended by the committee passed 249-189. A separate bill for wine was to come later, but in the event never appeared. The existing duties nominally totaled 6.33d. per pound but with automatic allowances and discounts came to only 5.28d. when bonded and 4.75d. when paid in cash. The resolutions accepted by the House on 16 March called for removing all the customs duties on tobacco except the subsidy of 1697 (a penny per pound nominally, but with 25 percent discount when paid in cash). The 1697 subsidy duty, alone of the various duties on tobacco, was payable to the king's civil list and, by leaving it as it was, the ministry hoped to avoid the charge of attempting to fatten the civil list. The remaining duties nominally totalling 5.SSd. —but actually only 4.43d. when bonded and 4d. when paid in cash —were to be replaced by an "inland duty" of 4d. per pound. Tobacco would be warehoused on entry without paying anything but the 1697 subsidy, but could not be removed from the king's warehouse until the "inland duty" had been paid in full. All this appeared to be similar to what had been adopted for coffee, chocolate, and tea in 1724 and what Dinwiddie (but not Crookshanks) had recommended in 1730. Though nothing explicit was said about excise,140 no one was fooled. When the bill was introduced on 4 April, it was a rather fullblooded excise measure. On entry, tobacco was to pay down the 1697 subsidy (reduced from a nominal penny per pound to three farthings because now paid in cash) and then be warehoused. The tobacco could be removed from the warehouse for export and draw back the subsidy; but it could be removed for domestic consumption only after paying the full inland duty of 4d. per pound. (Special arrangements, however, could be made to remove tobacco intended for manufacture and export without paying the inland duty.) A radical provision provided that all

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exported tobacco must give bond against relanding, such bonds to be discharged only upon return of sworn evidence that the tobacco had been landed abroad. This proposal had been advocated for generations but had previously only been adopted for Ireland. Unlike the 1724 Inland Duty Act for coffee, tea, and so forth, which left the warehouses and duty collection in the hands of customs, the new bill provided that those powers be vested in the commissioners to be named by his majesty for the new inland duty, that is, the excise commissioners. Their officers were given the universal powers of search common to excise officers. No one could trade in tobacco without registering with those officers and reporting to them in advance all intended movements of tobacco. As in other excise legislation, the commissioners in London were given extensive judicial powers; however, in the provinces such powers were in the first instance given to J.P.'s and not to excise officers (as in earlier legislation), a change designed to make the scheme seem more constitutional. From the excise commissioners or the J.P.'s, appeals could be carried only to special commissioners of appeal named from the judges of the high courts of Westminster and the judges of assize.141 The final version was thus much closer to Crookshanks's full excise model than to Dinwiddie's more moderate scheme. A long and spirited debate accompanied the introduction of the bill. A leading part was taken by Micajah Perry who, like others in opposition, put very low (£20,000 in his case) the amount that the government could possibly gain by the scheme. Against that were to be weighed the harassment to retailer and merchant. He thought he should have to give up the trade if the bill passed. Walpole in reply gave his personal estimate that the excise on tobacco and wine would bring in a further £300,000 to the crown (Crookshanks's figure). However, he insisted, even if it only brought £100,000, that was a sum worthy of their serious consideration. A motion by the opposition that the bill was out of order was easily defeated by the government, 232-176, a majority of 56 compared with 60 in March; a later motion to adjourn was defeated 237-199 (majority of 38), while the key motion that the bill should have a second reading passed 236-200, a majority of 36. The next day, the opposition forced a division on a motion to print the bill. This was contrary to precedent, for printing would invite petitions which were not received on money bills. Neverthe-

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less, the government turned back the opposition by only 128-112, a majority of only 16. Walpole then announced a further delay in bringing in the wine bill. He admitted that he wanted to see what happened to tobacco first. 148 The City of London then took the initiative. Despite the established precedent that the House did not accept petitions against money bills (confirmed that very March on a petition from Rhode Island against the Sugar Bill),143 the Common Council decided to sponsor a petition against the excise. This was carried to the House of Commons on the tenth, the day before the second reading, in a great procession of at least 80 coaches—a deliberate manifestation of the wealth of the City. A bitter debate ensued and the government was able to carry the rejection of the petition by a vote of only 214-197, a majority of just 17. Walpole had already decided that he must drop the scheme. The next day, when the bill came up for a second reading, he moved a postponement until 12 June, which effectively killed the measure. The wine bill was never introduced. 144 Illuminations, bell ringings, and some rioting greeted the news all over England. 14S It is not the purpose of this essay to analyze the inner parliamentary history of the excise bill. Paul Langford has done an excellent job of that. 14 * He emphasizes the significance of the developing opposition to Walpole in court circles, led by Lord Chesterfield. This manifested itself to only a limited degree in March by the defection of some Scots, particularly the Dalrymple kin of Lord Stair and the "dependents" of the Duke of Montrose and the Earls of Marchmont and Haddington. 147 Most of the defections in March, however, were of independent Whigs on whom the government could never count for sure. By contrast, on 10 April, a large number of normal government supporters abstained. Langford prints a list of seventy "Absent Members." 148 This list may not be absolutely representative of any given division, but it does indicate that many normal government supporters lost heart and simply stayed away in April. Quite the contrary happened to the opposition. Another list, which Langford apparently did not use, contains the names of twenty-seven or twenty-eight members who did not vote against the bill in March but did so later. 149 This list indicates that there were only seven "Whigs" who voted for the bill in March and against it in April. 150 The other twenty-one had not been present in March but showed up to vote "no" in April. They included two new Tory

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members of the House, 151 nine previously absent Tories, 151 six absent antiministerial Whigs'" and four absent otherwise proministerial Whigs. 154 In other words, while the discipline of Walpole's forces broke, the opposition was able to bring in the most lethargic country gentlemen and vote something close to their full strength. The opposition was not able to sustain this effort and make very much out of their victory over Walple. Langford analyzes masterfully their failure to use the excise issue in the election of 1734.ISS This inability to capitalize on Walpole's excise retreat was immediately manifest when on 20 April Sir John Barnard attempted to present a petition from the coffee, tea, and chocolate dealers asking to be relieved of the excise supervision established in 1724; the government was able to have the petition rejected, 250-150. When the opposition moved for a select committee to investigate frauds in the customs, the government could not resist, but succeeded in packing the committee with their own nominees.154 The resulting report presented by Sir John Cope on 7 June is one of the most informative committee reports of the eighteenth century on a financial or commercial question. While very factual, it gave essentially the government's view of the problem, paying particular attention to the testimony of Sir John Randolph, the Virginia agent, and the various frauds that the government had turned up in recent years. 1 " If the victory proved Pyrrhic for the political opponents of Walpole, it proved a quite substantial victory for the wine and tobacco dealers. Not till the time of the younger Pitt were they to be subjected to really tight controls. Who had used whom? For one tobacco dealer, the victory was rather bittersweet. Although Micajah Perry, who had borne the heaviest load against excise in the debates, was triumphantly reelected to Parliament for London in 1734 and was chosen Lord Mayor in 17381739, all was not well for him. In the debates, he had frequently insisted that the Virginia memorials had been obtained by false pretenses and that the majority of the planters were really opposed to excise. But, as Stephen Bordley of Maryland wrote to a merchant in Britain: "Notwithstanding the pains that You Merchants take to spread your Scurrilous libels amongst us against the Excise, I Can assure You we are Generally for it h e r e . . . & that. . . strenuously."15* In fact, the legislature of Virginia was so distraught by the news of the withdrawal of the excise bill that

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they sent an address of loyalty and thanks to the king with very sharp remarks about those who had blocked the king's good intentions towards them on the excise. Peter Leheup, their agent, thought the language too strong and after consulting the duke of Newcastle, secretary of state, suppressed the memorial. 15 ' Perry became the chief object of these resentments. For three generations, his family had acted as financial and occasional political agents for Virginia and he still retained the former function in 1733. This involved handling fairly large sums, for Virginia's export duties were payable in sterling bills of exchange. 160 But, as Governor Gooch explained to his brother in 1735, "No wonder the Alderman [Perry] is silent, he has lost sufficiently by opening his mouth too wide, Mr. [John] Grymes [receiver-general] having taken the public money out of his hands and put it into [Robert] Cary's." Gooch himself moved his own business to Cary.1*1 Walpole was even more vengeful. His private papers contain numerous reports on the weights of hogsheads imported and exported by Perry. 141 After the election of 1734, suit against Perry was begun in the Court of Exchequer alleging relanding of tobacco sold by Perry for export. Although there is no evidence that Perry had to pay anything, the suit went on for years and must have cost him much in legal fees. 1 " The average planter was less obviously but just as effectively vengeful. He simply reduced his tobacco shipments to Perry. Year after year, ship after ship of Perry's returned to London with less than full cargo—a most serious loss to a commission merchant who owned or chartered a vessel. Perry is reported to have lost more than £10,000 on shipping alone. (He also lost his seat in Parliament to a Tory in 1741.) In the mid-1740s he was forced to wind up his business under conditions of great distress. When he resigned his aldermancy in 1746, the corporation of the city gave him a pension of JG200-JC400 to save him from distress. After eighty years, the name of Perry disappeared from the trade. 164 THE SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES After all the excitement and passion of 1732-1734 had died down, what remained? What was the excise crisis really about? What were the real issues? Who had gained and who had lost?

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For the political opponents of Walpole, the substantive issues were unimportant. What was important for them was the chance to embarrass Walpole and perhaps bring him down. They surely succeeded in embarrassing him, but they failed in their broader objective of bringing him down in 1733 or at the next general election in 1734. Even so, something had been gained, for, as Lord Percival noted in his diary on the very day of Walpole's retreat, "it may be foretold that Sir Robert Walpole's influence in the House will never be again so great as it has been." 1 " For those on the other side there were, by contrast, a number of quite solid substantive issues which they hoped to convey to the House and to the nation—not, it has been seen, with very much success. These substantive issues were both commercial-colonial and administrative-financial. The older historians tended to neglect them, perhaps because they depended too much on the somewhat skimpy reports of parliamentary debates. There is a limit to what can be conveyed by even a two- or three-page summary of a long speech, and a limit to what a minister can convey of a technical subject in even the longest speech. In addition to the reports of debates, there were, of course, the pamphlets issued by the dozens during the excitement. In general they were neglected by historians till their usefulness was pointed out by Turner in 1927.144 But even Turner was rather undiscriminating in his use of the pamphlets. Nine out of ten of them were written by politicians or hired hacks who had no personal knowledge of either the colonial or the administrative dimensions of the problems being discussed. There were, however, a small handful of pamphlets written by people with personal knowledge of the issues in dispute. Attention to these few is an economical way of coming to grips with the interests at stake. The support of Virginia for the excise scheme was very clearly stated in a document prepared in June 1732 by committees of both houses of the Virginia assembly, including the very literate William Byrd II. After John Randolph's arrival in London, this document was issued early in 1733 as a pamphlet entitled The Case of the Planters of Tobacco in Virginia as Represented by Themselves, Signed by the President of the Council and Speaker of the House of Burgesses. After the legitimacy and validity of this document were attacked by the tobacco merchants of London and the opposition press, John Randolph issued a rather

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detailed sixty-nine-page pamphlet containing both the Case and a Vindication of the said Representation, of which he was the assumed author. The principal replies of the merchants to these very informed charges came in three pamphlets: (1) Considerations Relating to the Tobacco Trade at London, so Far as it Relates to the Merchants who are Factors, issued in mid-March 1733;147 (2) Observations on the Cast of the Planters of Virginia In a Letter to [Sir John Randolph], dated 3 April 1733;16* and (3) A Reply to the Vindication of the Representation of the Case of the Planters of Tobacco in Virginia, In a Letter to Sir J[ohn] R[andolph] from the Merchants or Factors of London. In their publications, the Virginians made five principal points: (1) the tobacco trade was in an unprecedented depression; (2) the consigning planter was in these difficult times particularly exploited by the commissions and charges of the commission merchant which seemed to rise as prices fell; he was also exploited by the standard deductions from the weights (draught or turn of the scale and sample) and by the London deduction of tret and clough on perishable goods; (3) the consigning planter was also defrauded by the mysterious shrinkage in the weights of his consigned tobacco, whether it was owing to pilferage by sailors and porters or to frauds at the scale on importation; (4) the consigning planter was further injured by the bankruptcies of the merchants to whom he had consigned his tobacco or the manufacturers to whom it had been sold; and (5) grievances 2-4 would be considerably alleviated, if not cured, by an excise scheme. In their replies, the merchants attempted to answer every point of the planters' complaint: (1) they denied that the trade was in an unprecedented depression, citing earlier years when prices of tobacco had been even lower in America (presumably wartime); (2) they denied that miscellaneous charges had risen in recent years; such charges varied only because actual expenses varied; samples were needed for sale to manufacturers and retailers; the commissions charged were quite reasonable when one considered that the merchant was out of funds for months at a time for sums paid down for the duty and for freight and did not charge the planter interest on this; (3) since more than the tobacco imported was on the account of merchants and not planters, the merchants were as aggrieved as the planters by pilfering and all forms of smuggling; if Midford and one or two other merchants had been

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caught in fraud, the whole community of merchants ought not to be condemned; (4) there had been very few bankruptcies in the trade in recent years, and the only big ones were inexperienced Virginians who had attempted to set up as merchants in London and were trusted too uncritically by their friends in the Chesapeake—an allusion to Edward Randolph, the merchant brother of Sir John and Isham Randolph, who at that very moment was in debtor's prison owing the crown over jC10,000;169 and (5) adopting an excise scheme would solve nothing. Although there were many political slurs and even falsehoods in the merchants' replies—particularly the claim that Sir John Randolph had been instructed by Virginia to oppose and not support an excise scheme—the economic part of their reply was not unreasonable. Underlying it all was a sense of the capital needs and "cash-flow" problems of the trade that was absent in the planters' complaint. Whether or not a merchant supplied goods to a planter on credit, he started to spend money as soon as he began to load a vessel for the Chesapeake. When the vessel returned, he had to find cash quickly for part of the duties (the Old Subsidy) and for freight and handling charges. While his tobacco was waiting months for sale, all these funds were tied up and if the tobacco was reexported, customs could be very slow in paying the drawback of duties. One important thing that alleviated the cash-flow problems of the trade was the long credit on the duties allowed by the government. Supported by such credit from the crown, "the Merchant. . . generally sells on Credit to a Wholesale Dealer; who likewise sells on Credit to the Country Dealer, and to the Shopkeeper in Town; the Shopkeeper retails it out, and often credits the Consumer." 1,0 If the crown credit were withdrawn, entry into the trade at every level would be limited to the more affluent, a development likely to reduce competition and lower prices. The excise scheme thus might help the reexport trade but would hurt the domestic trade which took the best and highestpriced Virginia tobaccos. To the extent that they could not see this, the planters of Virginia, it was implied, did not know their own best interests. When we try to reconstruct the substantive issues as they may have existed in the mind of Walpole, we are severely circumscribed. No relevant confidential letters or reports of confidential conversations survive. Instead we must rely, as did the earlier his-

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torians, on his speeches, plus the pamphlets ascribed to him and his now available working papers. 171 Although his pamphlets and his speeches show some courteous concern about the suffering of the planters and the desirability of improving other revenues so that the land tax can be lightened, most of their space is devoted to the narrow administrative problems of the tobacco revenue. This impression is supported by his working papers at Cambridge. In other words, Walpole appears to have seen the excise scheme as not very different from the countless other technical reform measures concerning taxation that the treasury brought in almost every year. A branch of the revenue was discovered to be producing less than it should; some change would have to be made in its mode of collection. Several such measures passed in almost every session of Parliament, for the most part without debate or a record division. (One such measure affecting tobacco was passed about every second year, ca. 1689-1727.) That this one did not slip through in the usual way was due to a variety of factors to which different historians may honestly ascribe different weights: the long delay between the leaking of the government's intention and the introduction of the scheme, which enabled both parliamentary and mercantile opposition to perfect their plans; the inherent suspiciousness of the English in matters of public money and personal liberties; the exceptional propagandistic effort in the provinces; the defection of the court grandees, which may have accounted for much of the demoralization among Walpole's normal supporters; and, finally, that conjuncture of economic depression, epidemics with high mortality (in the late 1720s) and political boredom uniting to create a kind of social and political malaise that could easily convert a minor proposal into a political grand explosion. But all the bonfires and bell ringings that hailed the retreat of Walpole did not alter the objective circumstances that had made both Virginia planters and Whitehall bureaucrats interested in the excise scheme. The Virginia and Maryland planters in the future expressed their distrust of the consignment system by selling their tobacco in the country rather than consigning it—to the advantage of the merchants of Glasgow and Whitehaven in particular, who bought directly and did not wait for consignments. By the time of the American Revolution, it is doubtful if much more than a quarter of the tobacco coming to Britain was still

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coming on consignment. The bureaucrats and technicians of the treasury also bided their time. In 1751, Henry Pelham's Tobacco Act (24 Geo. II c. 41) adopted much of the record keeping, paper controls, and searches of the excise scheme without using that horrible word. In 1789 the younger Pitt's Tobacco Act (29 Geo. Ill c. 68) finally brought in the compulsory warehouse and most of the remaining excise controls, while dividing the duties between customs and excise. Only when customs and excise were merged in the next century did the problem of names finally disappear. Was this all then just a tempest in a teapot, or a storm in a snuffbox? Yes and no. The cutting edge of the early modern state was its ability to tax. Only as the state expanded both its legal and its effective powers of taxation could it expand its more general pretensions and its ability to act in broader spheres externally and internally. The enemies of the state knew this, whether one is talking about the obstreperous Parlements of Louis XV or the House of Commons of Charles I, or the Stamp Act Congress. In England, so many of the great constitutional questions from the Bates Case to the Boston Tea Party started, of course, as questions of taxation. Thus, currants and tobacco and wine and tea, like stamps and ship money, can, in the context of taxation, acquire a historical significance that has nothing to do with their intrinsic importance. In a parliamentary regime, the shrewder experienced bureaucrats and technicians must realize that "you win a few and you lose a few," but the problem remains. The defeat of Walpole's excise scheme did not stop for long the process of the growth of taxation and state apparatus in Great Britain. NOTES 1. Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975). 2. William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 3 vols. (London, 1978) I, 366-407; III, 129-137. An earlier account by a hostile contemporary, but with the same parliamentary focus, is [James Ralph], A Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, now Earl of Orford (London, 1743), pp. 256-279. 3. Coxe, Robert Walpole, I, 379-380.

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4. One historian who noted Coxe's error was Edward Raymond Turner, "The Excise Scheme of 1733," English Historical Review XLII (1927), 47. 5. Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope (styled Lord Mahon when history published), History of England from the Peace of Utrecht. . 7 vols. (London, 1836-1854), II, 241-257. 6. Alexander Charles Ewald, Sir Robert Walpole: a Political Biography 1676-1745 (London, 1878), pp. 228-242; John Morley, Walpole ("Twelve English Statesmen" ser.) (London, 1889), pp. 169-182. 7. Turner, "The Excise Scheme of 1733," pp. 34-57; William Thomas Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth Century England to the Fall of Walpole (New York, 1936), especially pp. 337342. See also Robert Emmet Carson, "Journalistic Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole.. .1727-1742" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1944). 8. Paul Vacher, La Crise du Ministère Walpole en 1733-1734 (Paris, 1924); Norris Arthur Brisco, "The Economic Policy of Robert Walpole" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1907). 9. E.g., Frederick Scott Oliver, The Endless Adventure, 3 vols. (London, 1930-35), II, 234-277; George Robert Stirling Taylor, Robert Walpole and His Age (London, 1931), pp. 275-284. Other authors who fail to mention Perry include Laprade, Mahon, Morley, etc. 10. See n. 1; J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: the King's Minister (London, 1960), pp. 248-271. 11. American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1905 (Washington, D.C., 1906), I, 71-97. 12. John M. Hemphill II, "Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1689-1733" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1964). 13. Particularly Jacob M. Price, "The Tobacco Trade and the Treasury, 1685-1733: British Mercantilism in its Fiscal Aspects" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1954). 14. Ibid., chap. I, pp. 9-23. 15. Some of the early literature on excise is reviewed by E. R. Turner, "Early Opinion about English Excise," American Historical Review XXI (1916), 314-318. An able example is the anonymous Considerations Touching the Excise of Native and Foreign Commodities of ca. 1661. A well-known work not mentioned by Turner that advocated an excise for tobacco was John Cary, An Essay on the State of England (Bristol, 1695). Cary, a Bristol merchant, wanted to tax the export of unmanufactured tobacco to create employment at home. 16. Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, pp. 812-861. 17. Henry Saxby, The British Customs (London, 1757), pp. 13, 25. 18. Account of wine imported and exported, 1710-1765, in W. L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, C. Townshend MSS 8/22A/34. Tobacco data in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1975), II, 1189-1191. 19. Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, pp. 883-887. The unsuccessful

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tobacco bill of 1713 is in Home of Lords MSS, n.s., X, 211-222, with the tobacco clause on p. 213. 20. A Discourse of the Duties on Merchandize ([London], 1695); Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, pp. 867-868. 21. 6 September 1711; 12 February 1711/12. Defoe's ideas were elaborated upon in an anonymous pamphlet, possibly by him: Plunder and Bribery Further Discover'd in a Memorial... to the British Parliament (London, 1712); Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, pp. 868-890. 22. Public Record Office (hereafter PRO) T.1/161/19B ff. 66-67; Commons fournals XVII, 369; Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, p. 891. 23. Commons Journals XVII, 368-372; Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1924-1941), III, 324n. 24. 13 Annae c. 8 s. 5, 6 (Statutes of the Realm, IX, 918); House of Lords MSS., n.s., X, 213; Stock, Proceedings, III, 336-337; see pp. 330335. For the infrequent use of the optional warehouse, see Price, "Tobacco Trade," chap. X, pp. 896-897. 25. Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies (hereafter Cal.S.P.Col.A WI), 1712-1714, nos. 356, 473, i, ii, 647; Journal of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 1709-1715, pp. 527-528. 26. The 1733 House of Commons committee on customs frauds reprinted part of the Representation of the Council of Virginia to the Board of Trade, 11 September 1713. The Report with the Appendix, from the Committee of the House of Commons Appointed to Enquire into the Frauds and Abuses in the Customs. .. (London, 1733), p. 86, reproduced in Sheila Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (Wilmington, Del., 1975), XII, 323345. 27. Based on a forthcoming paper on "Scotland and the Customs Legislation of 1723." The main events are also covered in Patrick W. J. Riley, The English Ministers and Scotland 1707-1727 (London, 1964), pp. 276-280; T. C. Barker, "Smuggling in the Eighteenth Century: the Evidence of the Scottish Tobacco Trade," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography LXII (1954), 387-399. 28. 10 Geo. I c. 10 (Statutes at Large, Pickering ed., XV, 132-159); Stock, Proceedings, III, 472-474. Cf. Plumb, The King's Minister, pp. 233-237; Brisco, "Economic Policy," pp. 95-96; Coxe, Robert Walpole, I, 377; and Samuel Baldwin, A Survey of the British Customs (London, 1770), II, 119. 29. On Crookshanks, see Riley, English Ministers, passim; Calendar of Treasury Books, XXI, 258-259, 401; XXIV, 597; XXVI, 106; XXIX, 222, 270, 275, 342, 549; XXX, 427, 548; XXXI, 108; XXXII, 73, 76, 82-83, 105, 562, 593; Calendar of Treasury Papers, 1702-1707, 527; 1708-1714, 14, 77, 82; 1714-1719, 88, 121, 132, 266; Calendar of Treasury Books and Papers, I, 377, 567, 598; II, 214 and passim; III,

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passim; IV, 148, 176; Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL) Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS, Correspondence, no. 1415 Crookshanks to Walpole, 5 January 1726/27 with enclosed "Case and Petition" and appendices. Crookshanks' publication was Instructions for the Collectors and Other Officers Employ'd in Her Majesties Customs, 9c. in the North-Part of Great-Britain... (Edinburgh, 1707). 30. CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS., correspondence no. 923 Crookshanks to Walpole, 21 October 1721. 31. Ibid., nos. 1150, 1151, 1162 Crookshanks to Walpole, 24, 26 July, 25 August 1724; and ms. 29/6. 32. Ibid., correspondence no. 1944 Crookshanks to Walpole, Seville, 1 January 1732/33. 33. Robert Paul, assistant comptroller general in England, sent Walpole on 1 October 1724 an intelligent explanation of the current tobacco duties and their disappointing yield: only about £120-JC130,000 per annum in England net. Ibid., 29/5. The next summer, the treasury received detailed accounts of the Scottish tobacco trade, 1722-1725. PRO T.36/13. 34. On Dinwiddie, see Dictionary of American Biography and Louis Knott Koonz, Robert Dinwiddie (Glendale, Calif., 1941), pp. 33, 35; and see.fournal of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 17181722, pp. 386-387. 35. CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 86/124; Cal.S.P.Col.A WI, 1730, nos. 82, 119, 121, 195. 36. 3 Geo. II c. 28 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., VI, 35). There were substantial interests pushing for the rice liberalization bill. If Dinwiddie did not "cause" it, he was at least alert to the real possibilities of his time. 37. PRO T.1/272/27. 38. PRO T.1/276/21 ff. 104-111. 39. PRO Ind. 4624 (Treasury Reference Book, IX), p. 457. 40. Historical Statistics of the United States, II, 1190. 41. The best account of the Virginia tobacco economy at this time is John M. Hemphill, "Virginia and the English Commercial System." For the Maryland side, see the articles by Russell E. Menard, Gloria L. Main, and Paul G. E. Clemens in Aubrey C. Land et al., Law, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977). 42. University of Virginia, Carter letter book, I, 16, 34; Virginia Historical Society, Carter letter book, I, 28. 43. See n. 40. In 1725, the price of ordinary tobacco for export reached 5d. per lb. in London, a price not reached again till the American Revolution. Cf. CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/7. 44. Jacob M. Price, The Tobacco Adventure to Russia (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., LI, pt. 1) (Philadelphia, 1961), 103. 45. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, Treasurer's and Comptroller's Papers, Port Roanoke, vol. 13 ff. 48-57.

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46. For Glasgow losses in the period of low prices, ca. 1728, see Robert Wodrow, Analecta (Maitland Club, 60) (Edinburgh, 1842-43), IV, 1-2, 10, 84, 162-163; University of Virginia, Carter letter book, I, p. 12; Virginia Historical Society, Carter letter book, I, p. 25. 47. Cal.S.P.Col.A WI, 1728 1729, no. 351; 1 Geo. II c. 4 (Hening, ed.. Statutes at Large of Virginia, 197); PRO C.0.5/1S21/R.90 (transcripts of C.O.5 in LC). 48. Cal.S.P.Col.AWI, 1728-1729, nos. 241, 402, 416, 510, 740, 742, 879; 1 Geo. II c. 1 (Hening, Statutes at Large of Virginia, 182); PRO C.0.5/1321/R.76, 87, 88, 89, 106; C.O.5/1322 ff. 27-28 (pp. 53-56). For the 1726 act against North Carolina, see Hening, 175-177 and Cal.S.P.Col.AWI, 1728-1729, nos. 184, 372; 1731, nos. 323, 382, 515, 516; PRO C.0.5/1321/R.95; C.0.5/1323/S.2. 49. 2 Geo. II c. 9 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., V, 680) repealed the objectionable clause in 9 Geo. I c. 21 (Ruffhead, V, 456-459). Cf. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 12-13, 25-28; The Case of the Planters of Virginia and the Merchants Trading Thither (London, 1729); and University of Virginia, R. Carter letter-book, I, 18-20, Cal.S.P.Col.AWI, 1728-1729, nos. 241, 262, 562, 611, 641; PRO C.0.5/1321/R.76, 99, 107-108; C.0.5/1337 ff. 42-43, 92-93 (old nos. 69-71). 50. Cal.S.P. Col. A WI, 1728-1729, nos. 796, 797, 897; 1730, nos. 159, 264, 289, 348, 350, 538, 577, 580, 591, 635; 1731, nos. 62, 74, 85, 86, 164,187, 199, 289, 363; PRO C.O.5/1322 pp. 47-50 and R.127, R.133136, R.141-142, R.144, R.147, R.151, R.160, R.163, R.170; C.O.5/ 1337/72, 75, 80; Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (hereafter CWF), transcripts of letters from Gov. Gooch to brother, 28 June 1729, 7 January 1729/30, 9 April, 28 May, 24 July 1730, 12 June 1731, 28 July 1732; Library of Congress, transcripts from archives of Bishop of London, formerly at Fulham Palace, Commissary Blair to Bishop, 14 May 1731, Francis Peart to Geo. Gibson, 15 April 1732. 51. On Bishops Sir Thomas Gooch, bart. and Thomas Sherlock, see Dictionary of National Biography. The former had married the latter's sister. See also L. P. Curtis, Chichester Towers (New Haven, 1966), pp. 13-27, for their roles in the politics of Chichester cathedral chapter. 52. CWF, Gooch transcripts, 9 April 1730, 28 July 1732. 53. There are two genealogies of the Le Heup or Heheup family, one in the Wagner genealogies, Library of the Huguenot Society of London, formerly at Horsham, now at University College, London; the other in Gery Milner-Gibson-Cullum, Pedigree of Wittewronge of Ghent in Flanders... together with... Le Heup and Cullum (London, 1905), pp. 23-28. Both err in describing Peter jr. rather than Peter sr. as the treasury clerk. See also Bank of England Record Office, subscription book (1694) and P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England (London, 1967), pp. 449, 495. 54. On Isaac, see Romney Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970), II, 208; Nottingham University Library, Newcastle deposit: Henry Pelham MSS, box 1,

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H. Walpole to Pelham, 9 August 1742; J. F. Chance, List of English Diplomatic Representatives in Denmark, Sweden and Rtissia (Oxford, 1913), p. 26; D. B. Horn, British Diplomatic Representatives 16891789, Camden Third Series, XLVI (London, 1932), 41, 142. 55. On him, see n. 53 and Gentleman's Magazine, XIX (1749), 332. There was a fourth brother, Thomas (baptized 1705) who had died by 1744. 56. See n. 53. 57. J. C. Sainty, Office-Holders in Modem Britain I: Treasury Officials 1660-1870 (London, 1972), pp. 6, 35, 37, 98, 136. Peters son Thomas Leheup was briefly assistant solicitor of the Treasury (17461747) but died in 1747, aet. 21. 58. According to Dickson, Financial Revolution, p. 381, the office was not established till 1725. Peter, however, wrote that he had held that post since its establishment by his father-in-law Lowndes. BM Add. MS 32,869 fol. 100, P. Leheup to Newcastle, 19 July 1765; Cal. T. Papers, 1720-1728, p. 234; Cal. T.B.9P. 1735-1738, p. 231. 59. Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 63, 102; Cal. T. Papers, 1720-1728, pp. 535-536; Cal. T.B.&P., 1729-1730, pp. 120, 122 , 215, 1735-1738, p. 356; 1739-1741, p. 489. 60. Cal. T.B.&P., 1731-1734, p. 166; 1735-1738, pp. 265, 337, 432; 1739-1741, 153, 364; 1742-1745, 187, 604, 800. 61. Ibid., 1735-1738, pp. 253, 296; 1739-1741, pp. 461, 495; 17421745, pp. 19, 45, 232. 62. Ibid., 1742-1745, pp. 238, 252, 579, 644, 648, 663, 688. 63. Commons Journals XXVI, 861, 870, 872, 873, 879, 975, 979, 987-1001; Gentleman's Magazine, XXV (1755), 184, 2330 Clark, British Treasury, p. 86; Edward P. Lilly, "The Colonial Agents of New York and New Jersey" (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1936), 61n; Henry Roseveare, The Treasury: the Evolution of a British Institution (London, 1969), pp. 105-106. Most of the charges against Leheup were procedural, but Newcastle was determined during his first months in office to give an appearance of utmost rigor. (He dismissed most of the customs officers at Bristol at the same time.) For Leheup's side, see BM Add. MS 32,735 f. 320, Add. MS 32,855 ff. 385, 467-469, Add. MS 32,856 f. 1, Add. MS 32,871 f. 178, Leheup to Newcastle, 23 May 1754, to [James West?]; 7 June 1755; to Newcastle, 11, 16 June 1755, 30, May 1757. The last alleges that during the "Forty-Five," Leheup had a special commission from Henry Pelham to wait on all the rich men in London and ask them to advance money on the security of the land tax. (I am indebted to Dr. Daniel Hirshberg for copies of the Leheup correspondence.) 64. BM Add. MS 32,869 f. 100, Leheup to Newcastle, 19 July 1765. 65. Lilly, Colonial Agents, pp. 61-62, 68-71, 84-85, 99,161, 225; Lillian M. Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies (London, 1924), pp. 167-168, 250; Ella Lonn, The Colonial Agents of the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1945), pp. 60-61, 290, 295. Pen-

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son limits his service for Barbados to 1735-36, but Lilly (61n) dates his service there from 1730. Leheup was still in touch with New York in 1736. £. B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 14 vols. (Albany, 1856-1883), VI, 78. 66. On his income, see Lilly, Colonial Agents, pp. 68-71; Lonn, Colonial Agents, pp. 304, 313; Dickson, Financial Revolution, p. 381 [mistakenly calling him Thomas]; Sainty, The Treasury, p. 6. According to Roseveare, The Treasury, p. 104, underclerks received from jC30 to £350 per annum in fees, depending on seniority, while chief clerks were getting £700 per annum by the 1750s. 67. MSS of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of... Viscount Perceval (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 63), 3 vols. (London, 1920-1923), II, 183; see also II, 73, 123. 68. Lilly, Colonial Agents, pp. 205-206; 3 Geo. II c. 12 (Statutes at Large, Ruffheaded., VI, 5); Stock, Proceedings, IV, 56, 58-60, 62, 75. 69. Lonn, Colonial Agents, pp. 239-240; 3 & 4 Geo. II c. 3 ( Virginia Statutes at Large, Hening ed., IV, 247-271); Cal.S.P.Col.AWI, as in n. 50. 70. CWF, Gooch transcripts, Gov. Gooch to Dr. Thomas Gooch, 28 July 1732. 71. Ibid., 7 January 1729/30. 72. 3 & 4 Geo. II c. 3 s. 10, 31, 32 (Virginia Statutes at Large, Hening ed., IV, 247-271). S. 3 also prohibited the exportation of loose or "bulk" tobacco whose importation was already prohibited in Britain to check smuggling. 73. 3 Geo. II c. 12, 28 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., VI, 5, 35). 74. 4 Geo. II c. 15 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., VI, 59). 75. 5 Geo. II c. 7, 24; 6 Geo. II c. 13 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., VI, 74-75, 116-119). 76. Cf. Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, Correspondence politique: Angleterre, v. 378 ff. 26-27, 86-88. 77. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 115, 128, 165. 78. Leonard Woods Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors 1670-1776 (New York, 1935, 1967), I, 338. The clause appeared in the instructions to governors of the thirteen colonies repeatedly between 1689 and 1754 (Virginia, 1702-1738). 79. Cal.S.P. Col.A WI, 1728-1729, nos. 45, 190, 351; PRO C.O.5/ 1321/R.70, 90. 80. Cal.S.P. Col. A WI, 1728-1729, no. 241 (pp. 117-118); PRO C.0.5/1321/R.76; 1 Geo. II c. 11 ( Virginia Statutes at Large, Hening ed., IV, 222-228). 81. Cal.S.P.Col.AWI, 1728-1729, nos. 593, 606, 614, 637, 722, 730731. The 1705 act complained against was 4 Annae c. 34 ( Virginia Statutes at Large, ed. Hening, III, 377-381). 82. Cal.S.P. Col. A WI, 1730, no. 289; 1731, no. 434, iii; PRO C.O.5/ 1337/75. The unsatisfactory law was 3 & 4 Geo. II c. 5 ( Virginia Statutes at Large, ed. Hening, IV, 273-275). 83. Bristol, Merchants Hall Archives, Minutes of Proceedings, V, 23

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February 1730/31; Cal.S.P.ColAWI, 1731, nos. 367, 401, 406, 434, 473; 1732, nos. 22, 24 [same as previous 473], 32, 36, 55, 176, 196, 197; PRO C.0.5/1322 ff. 187-191v, 194-199v, 216-217v. 84. 5 Geo. II c. 7 (Statutes at Large, Ruffhead ed., VI, 74-75); Stock, Proceedings, IV, 128, 130,145,150, 153-155, 160. The House of Lords Record Office (transcripts in LC) contains a copy of the Board of Trade report of 21 January 1731/32 and I. Randolph's petition to be heard. See also Cal.S.P.ColAWI, 1732, no. 136; and Bristol, Merchants Hall Archives, Minutes of Proceedings, 14 December 1731. 85. The resentment of the Virginians against the merchants is very clearly expressed in Cal.S.P.ColAWI, 1731, no. 473; 1732, no. 24, PRO C.0.5/1322/R.169 (the council's remonstrance) and in the handbill prepared by I. Randolph: The Case of the Tobacco Planters in His Majesty's Colony of Virginia, as to the Bill now Depending in the House of Lords, for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in His Majesty's Plantations and Colonies Abroad ([London, 1732]); imprint in John Carter Brown Library, but MS version in BL Add. MS 22,265 ff. 102-104. 86. John, Baron Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second from His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, ed. John Wilson Croker, 2 vols. (London, 1848), I, 160-161; ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols. (London, 1931), I, 132-133. 87. Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth 16881959 (University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Economics, Monographs, 8) (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 29, 48, 65, 78, 80. 88. T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1959), 181; Sir William Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I.. . Mercantile Era (London, 1939), p. 82. The price of wheat (Winchester College) in the last quarter of 1732 and first quarter of 1733 was 21s. 9d. per quarter, lower than the price at any time since 1670, except for the latter half of 1705, when it was a few pence lower. It was to be still lower in 1742-1744, but those were years of war when access to foreign markets could be restricted. 89. B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), p. 401. 90. Langford, The Excise Crisis, p. 33; Brisco, Fiscal Policy, p. 85. 91. Brisco, Economic Policy, p. 100; Plumb, The King's Minister, pp. 239-244; Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance (Manchester, 1934), pp. 291-307. 92. B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 387, 389; T . S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1959), p. 186; "Net Income and Expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland since 1688," British Parliamentary Papers (1868-1869), XXXV (Accounts and Papers, 2), II, 280-281 (762-763). 93. PRO T.17/10 p. 158, Scrope to Edinburgh board, 28 September 1731.

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94. PRO T. 1/283 ff. 105-117, contains drafts of a warehouse scheme without an excise connection, plans for bonds on export (similar to 1724 "inland duty" act on coffee and tea), with notes on the number of warehousekeepers to be needed. These documents are undated but have been bound in the volume for May-August 1733. However, since they contain no mention of excise, they cannot be later than mid-1731. Similar models can be found in CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/2526. Among Walpole's own papers are a warehouse-only scheme (perhaps from Arthur Dobbs) ibid., 41/51 and a merchant's comment on a warehouse scheme (ibid., 29/4/2). Both called for limiting the number of ports open to tobacco, a proposal not pursued by Walpole. 95. Observations on the Case of the Planters of Virginia, In a Letter to [John Randolph] (London, 1733), p. 2. This was probably written by Micajah Perry. Another person who has been mentioned as a possible source of Walpole's ideas was Arthur Dobbs, Irish M.P. and later governor of North Carolina. Dobbs was particularly interested in the problem of smuggling and relanding from the Isle of Man and had interviews with Walpole on visits to London in 1730 and 1732. After the latter, he sent Walpole a scheme for acquiring the suzerainty of the Isle of Man from Lord Derby and for a general excise, in place of customs duties on highly taxed imports. Dobbs, however, may have picked up this idea from the London press in late 1732; there is no firm evidence that he advocated it at his earlier interview with Walpole in 1730. C. R. Fay, "Arthur Dobbs, Adam Smith and Walpole's Excise Scheme," Historical fournal IV (1961), 203-207; Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs Esquire 1689-1765 (London, 1958), pp. 29-42. Dobbs was named engineer and surveyor-general of Ireland in 1733. Among the anonymous schemes received by Walpole showing special concern for Ireland are those in CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/25 and 41/51. 96. Langford (The Excise Crisis, p. 30) suggests that the scheme may have been sent out by Horatio Walpole, auditor-general of the plantation revenues. However, there is nothing in Gooch's surviving correspondence to suggest that he was in correspondence with Horatio. All the work of the auditor general's office appears to have been done by the deputy Leheup! 97. Executive fournals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, vol. IV, 1721-1739, ed. H. R. Mcllwaine (Richmond, Va., 1930), pp. 258-259. 98. Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, Lonsdale MSS., 2nd dep., correspondence, bdle. 50, no. 97, Lowther to Spedding, London, 21 March 1731/32. Cf. also no. 35, same to same, 17 June 1732. 99. Lowther knew his way around Whitehall, and his acquaintance included John Hill, Walpole's manager on the customs board. 100. Legislative fournals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, ed. H. R. Mcllwaine, 3 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1918), II, 796, 798, 808-813; fournals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1727-1740, ed. H. R. Mcllwaine (Richmond, Va., 1910), pp. 152, 159-161, 164, 167. The letter of introduction for Randolph to the treasury (1 July 1732) is in

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PRO T. 1/279/20 ff. 92-93; the more circumspect letter of introduction from Gooch (16 July 1732) is in T.l/279/23 ff. 98-99. 101. University of Virginia, R. Carter letter book, IV, 68, to M. Perry, 10 July 1732. 102. Price, "Tobacco Trade and Treasury," pp. 894-895. 103. Vertrees Judson Wyckoff, Tobacco Regulation in Colonial Maryland (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Extra Volumes, n.s., 22) (Baltimore, Md., 1936), p. 154; Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, Correspondance politique: Angleterre v. 378 ff. 86-88 (7 September 1732); Read's Weekly Journal, no. 382 (15 July 1732). 104. Cal.S.P. Col.A WI, 1732, pp. 97-99 (no. 149); PRO C.O.5/ 1323/S.6; Archives of the Bishop of London formerly at Fulham Palace: Virginia, I, no. 137, Gooch to Bishop, 12 August 1732 (LC transcript). 105. Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, Correspondance politique: Angleterre v. 378 ff. 26-27. 106. The holding of such a full cabinet meeting is inferred from a report by Lord Perceval that Horatio Walpole told him in April 1733 that Lord Scarborough "was the very man who last summer pressed the resolution of this Excise, because it would be the most grateful thing that could be to the nation." Perceval Diary (H.M.C. 63), I, 359. The second Earl of Scarborough, a privy councillor and Master of the Horse, would only have been consulted at a full cabinet meeting. Such meetings of the full or "outer" cabinet took place normally only at the beginning and end of a parliamentary session. 107. Riley, The English Ministers and Scotland, pp. 270-289. 108. PRO T.29/27, p. 158; T. 17/10, p. 303, Scrope to Edinburgh board, 6 October 1732. 109. PRO T.36/13 Report of 18 December 1732, covering letter of 21 December 1732 and accompanying documents. See also National Library of Scotland, SB 19 Vaughan to Milton, AyT, 15 November 1732. 110. W. L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, C. Townshend MSS, old no. 8/22A/34. 111. Price, "Tobacco Trade and Treasury," I, 107-111; CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/20; PRO T.l/281/12, T.l/278/30, PRO 30/8/81. 112. Ibid. 113. PRO T.36/13 Accounts of 5 March 1728/29 and 15 December 1732 signed A. Norman. 114. E.g., BL Add. MS 33,085 G. Longueville to T. Pelham, 21 October 1732. 115. Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics, pp. 337-338. Pulteney had earlier raised the cry of "general excise" in The Case of the Removal of the Salt Duty, published around 1 June 1732 and answered in the Daily Courant of 24 June. Such charges had some effect, for John Spedding wrote to James Lowther on 14 June 1732 from Whitehaven, "The

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Country begins to be mightily allarm'd w[i]th the designs that are on foot for introducing a Generall Excise." Cumbria RO, Carlisle, Lonsdale MSS, J. Spedding letterbook [25]. The first leading article on excise appeared in the Craftsman of 4 November. 116. American Weekly Mercury, no. 684 (30 January-6 February 1732/33), p. 2, story dated London, 11 November 1732. Randolph was knighted on the occasion of his presentation of the address to the King. 117. The English accounts were not received till after 16 January. PRO T.29/27 (Minute Book), pp. 173, 181; T. 17/10, pp. 339, 344, 368, 373, 389; T.27/25, pp. 131, 139, 148, 149. The Treasury Board met less frequently than usual during January-May 1733. 118. In particular, CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/27, 29, 31, 33; 43/1-11. Walpole's own rough notes show excise and Scottish material suggestively mixed. 119. Ibid., 29/32. 120. Ibid., 29/29a, notes of an interview with Lane. 121. See n. 115. The principal pamphlet literature is analyzed in Turner, "The Excise Scheme of 1733," The English Historical Review XLII (1927), 34-57. 122. Langford, Excise Scheme, pp. 47, 172. There are two collections of these letters, etc.: (1) A Collection of Letters from Several Counties, Cities and Boroughs, Containing Instructions to their Representatives in Parliament to Oppose any Extensions of the Excise Laws (London, 1733), p. 27, and (2) Excise: Being a Collection of Letters, 9c. Containing the Sentiments and Instructions of the Merchants, Traders, Gentry... to their Representatives in Parliament, against... any Extension of Excise Laws. .. (London, 1739), p. 39. From the latter, pp. 8, 22, 34-35, we can probably add Bedwin (Wilts), King's Lynn (Norfolk!) and Sudbury (Suffolk). Birmingham and Oxford apparently should be added too. BL Add. MS 47,085 (1 February 1732/33); M. G. Hobson, ed., Oxford Council Acts 1701-1752 (Oxford Historical Society, n.s., X) (Oxford, 1954). 123. Commonsfournals XXI, 447-448, 451-452, 457, 459, 462, 466467, 470, 472, 476, 479, 482, 484, 489, 495, 498, 502, 506, 510, 534, 544, 546, 558, 641-643, 645, 647, 650, 663, 676, 698, 701, 793, 830. The grievances involved are expressed in two contemporary publications: A Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade... (London, 1730) and The Case of the Shopkeepers, Manufacturers, and Fair Traders... (S.l. [ca. 1730]). Both try to link the peddlers with smuggling and are thus part of the psychological prehistory of the excise affair. 124. I have noted only two Scottish pamphlets touching on the excise affair: An Enquiry into Some Things that Concern Scotland... (Edinburgh, 1734). On pp. 13-14, the antiministerial author blames the remittance of the malt and other taxes for impoverising Scotland; excise would have taken another £30,000 per annum. This was in answer to a proexcise pamphlet, Some Considerations for Continuing the Present Parliament.

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125. Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Correspondance politique: Angleterre, v. 376 ff. 158v-160 [Chauvigny?] to [Chauvelin], 126. Hervey, Memoirs, ed. R. Sedgwick, p. 138. 127. John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (s.l, 1893), pp. 183-185; The History of the Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol (Bristol, 1903), p. 189; Merchants House, Bristol, Book of Proceedings, V, 9 January, 12 March 1732/1733; Latimer's calendar, 318. 128. Sir James Allanson Picton, ed., City of Liverpool: Municipal Archives and Records from A.D. 1700... (Liverpool, 1886), p. 149; Excise, being a collection of letters, 22; Craftsman, 6, 20 January 1732/33. 129. See n. 115 and Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 50, Lowther to Spedding, 18 November, 12 December 1732. 130. Ibid., bdle. 50 Lowther to Spedding, 4, 6, 11, 18, 20 January, 10 February 1732/33; John Spedding's letter book [25], 1732-33, to Lowther, 12, 17 January, 4 February 1732/33. The Whitehaven merchants received other letters from London to the same effect. 131. BL Add. MSS 47,074 newsletters of 2, 9 December 1732. 132. Daily Journal, no. 3736 (23 December 1732); Excise, being a Collection, 19-20; BL Add. MS 47,084, newsletter, 23, 30 December 1732. 133. BL Add. MS 47,085 newsletter, 9 January 1732/33. On the continuity of this threepenny levy, see Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Mem. et doc.: France, v. 2008 ff. 344v-345; Price, "France and the Chesapeake," 651. 134. Read's Weekly Journal, no. 408 (13 January 1733). 135. BL Add. MS 47,085 newsletters, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 18, 23, 27, 30 January; 1, 6, 8, 15, 17, 20, 24 February; 3, 6, 8, 13 March 1732/33; Add MS 27,732 ff. 95, 99, 123-126, 131-132. On 15 February, the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council of London adopted a formal representation to the city's M.P.'s asking them to vote against the excise. See also Perceval Diarv (H.M.C. 63), I, 306-308, 311-312, 329, 330, 338, 340; MSS of the Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, Yorkshire (H.M.C. 42: XVth Report, part 6), pp. 97-103; Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS 2d dep, correspondence, bdle. 50, Lowther to Spedding, 20 February 1732/33; William Maitland, The History and Survey of London, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1760), II, 546-548; American Weekly Mercury, no. 697 (3-10 May 1733). 136. See their biographies in Sedgwick, House of Commons. 137. Campbell's son John was a commissioner of customs at £ 1000 per annum, while his second son was Inspector of Tobacco at £ 3 5 0 per annum. National Library of Scotland MS SB 19 Milton to Islay, 3 April 1733. Three others, cousins or factors of D. Campbell, were also in the Scottish customs, for another £ 4 5 0 per annum. 138. See nn. 133, 136. Perry at first was not only consulted about Vir-

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ginia patronage, but was allowed to nominate a surveyor of houses in Lancashire. PRO T.29/26, p. 158. 139. Commons Journals XXII, 26-27, 58, 77, 79, 89. (Some of the accounts presented were originally prepared when the House considered the anti-Scottish complaints in 1721-1723.) 140. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 197-201; Commons Journals XXII, 8991; [John Almon], An History of the Parliament of Great Britain, from the Death of Queen Anne to the Death of King George II (London, 1764), pp. 226-239; Maitland, London, II, 548-562; Carlisle MSS. (H.M.C. 42), pp. 103-105; Perceval Diary (H.M.C. 63), I, 342-343; BL Add. MS 27, 372 ff. 137-140, 143-144 Delafaye to Essex, 15, 22 March 1732/33; Add MS 47,085 newsletters 15, 17 March 1732/33. Sir James Lowther reported that Walpole "has bin forc't to alter his first Scheme, & there may be further alterations made... so as he may not be so fond of it." Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 50, Lowther to Spedding, 20, 31 March 1732/33. In addition to the division list for 14 March given in Langford, The Excise Crisis, pp. 173-174, there are at least four further examples: (1) The List, a four-page broadside in BL Egerton MSS 2543 ff. 409-410 and Houghton Library, Harvard, with a p.s. listing 27 members (including Tucker) who "voted afterwards against the Excise." This list is significant, because Langford tells us that there are no division lists after 14/16 March. (2) The Lords Protest in the Late Session of Parliament... with an Alphabetical List of all the Members who Voted For and Against the Excise-Bill... (London, 1733) in BL, etc.; (3) An Exact and Compleat List of the House of Commons (s.l. [1733]) in Houghton Library, Harvard; and (4) in the W. L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, a list appended to the version of the excise bill published by A. Moore (see next note). 141. Though the House never authorized the printing of the excise bill, there were several private unauthorized printings. I have used that printed in London by A. Moore (The Excise Bill for Repealing Several Subsidies and an Impost on Tobacco... [1733]), which also contains a division list. Another version is in The Most Important Transactions of the Sixth Session of the First Parliament of... King George II A.D. 1733 (London, [1733]). 142. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 204-206; Perceval Diary (H.M.C. 63), I, 347-356; BL Add. MS 47,085 newsletter, 5 April 1733; Add. MS. 27,232 ff. 147-148 Delafaye to Essex, 5 April 1733; Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 50, Lowther to Spedding, 5 April 1733; Weekly Register, no. 156 (7 April 1733). 143. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 189-194. 144. Ibid., IV, 209; BL Add. MS 27,732 ff. 152-153 Delafaye to Essex, 12 April 1733; Add. MS 47,085 newsletters 7, 10, 12, 14 April 1733; Perceval Diary (H.M.C. 63), I, 356-361; Carlisle MSS. (H.M.C. 42), 107-111; Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 51, Lowther to Spedding, 10 April 1733. 145. BL Add. MS 47,085 newsletter, 12, 14, 21 April 1733; Cumbria

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RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 51, Lowther to Spedding, 12,14 April 1733, cf. also 8 May; Read's Weekly Journal, 14, 21 April 1733; Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, Xl.17311735, ed. H. E. Salter (Oxford, 1921), 185; American Weekly Mercury, nos. 705, 709 (28 June-5 July, 26 July-3 August 1733); Latimer, Bristol in 18th Century, pp. 183-185. After the withdrawal, quiet people in the country began to wonder whether it might not have been desirable. See The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665-1752 (Manchester, 1967), p. 212. Sir James Lowther was disturbed at the spread of such ideas in Cumberland. Cumbria RO, Lonsdale MSS, 2d dep., correspondence, bdle. 51 to Spedding, 8, 10, 15, 22 May 1733. 146. Langford, Excise Crisis, chaps. 6-7. 147. There are some interesting comments on the Scottish side in National Library of Scotland, SB 20 Islay to Milton, 17, 24 March, 14 April 1733. 148. Langford, Excise Crisis, pp. 80-83, 175-176. 149. The List, 4 (as in n. 140). There is confusion over one name, "Sir William Ellis"; there was no such person in Commons then. I have assumed that this was a typographical error merging two names: Sir William Lowther and Richard Ellys. 150. Lord Charles Cavendish (Westminster), Lord James Cavendish (Derby), Sir Thomas Clarke (Hertford), Sir William Lowther (Pontefract, Yorks.), Lord Tyrconnel (Grantham, Lines.) and John Yorke (Richmond, Yorks.). Sir Thomas Prendergast (Chichester) had not yet returned when the resolutions were carried in committee but was present two days later to vote for the excise on the report. 151. Sir Charles Bunbury, bt. (Tory, Chester), Sir Edward Dering, bt. (Tory, Kent). 152. Sir George Beaumont, bt. (Leicester), George Clarke (Oxford University), Sir John Coryton, bt. (Callington, Cornwall), Lord Coleraine (Boston), Sir Edward des Bouverie, bt. (Shaftesbury, Dorset), John H. Gifford (Westbury, Wilts), Thomas Horner (Somerset), Francis Knollys (Oxford), Edmund Mortimer Pleydell (Dorset). 153. Thomas Bootle (Liverpool), Richard Ellys (Boston), William Noel (Stamford, Lines.), Edward Rudge (Aylesbury, Bucks.), John Rudge (Evesham, Worcs.), John Weaver (Bridgnorth, Salop). 154. Sir Cecil Bishop, bt. (Penryn, Cornwall), Ralph Jenison (Northumberland), Benjamin Haskin Stiles (Devizes, Wilts), and Edward Tucker (Weymouth, Dorset). 155. Langford, Excise Crisis, chap. viii. 156. Carlisle MSS (H.M.C. 42) 111-114; BL Add. MS 27,732 ff. 154155, 162-163 Delafaye to Essex, 19, 26 April 1733. 157. Stock, Proceedings, IV, 220-224; published separately as in n. 26. The report from the customs board to the committee is in CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/35. 158. Maryland Historical Society, S. Bordley letterbook, I, 82-84, to Samuel White, 25 September 1733.

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159. PRO C.0.5/1337 ff. 170-172, Leheup to Couraud (secretary to Newcastle), 8 January 1734/35, with enclosed address, endorsed "it was thought improper to print this Address." 160. Lonn, Colonial Agents, 283. Perry was also agent for Pennsylvania. For the work of financial agents, see Jacob M. Price, "The Maryland Bank Stock Case," in Aubrey C. Land et al., Law, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore, Md., 1977), pp. 3-8; Percy Scott Flippin, The Financial Administration of the Colony of Virginia (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. XXXIII, no. 2) (Baltimore, 1915), pp. 59-60. 161. CWF, Gooch transcripts, 35-36, 41-42, 45-46 to brother, 20 July 1733, 8 March 1734/35, 5 July 1735. 162. CUL Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS 29/2, 3; 44/42. 163. The Political State, XLIX (January 1735), 22-24; LI (January 1736), 31-32; LII (August 1736), 131. 164. Sir William Purdie Treloar, bt., A Lord Mayor's Diary 1906-7 to which is added the Official Diary of Micajah Perry 1738-9 (London, 1920), pp. viii-x, xv-xx; Felix Farley's BristolJournal, no. 130 (10 January 1746/47); LC Jones Papers, V, ff. 687-688, W. King to T. Jones, 6 December 1743, Custis Family Papers, J. Hanbury to J. Custis, 7 March 1745/46. 165. Perceval Diary (H.M.C. 63), I, 361. 166. Turner, "The Excise Crisis." 167. There is a copy in the Kress Library, Harvard. The pamphlet is mentioned in a newsletter of 20 March 1732-1733 in BL Add. MS 47,085. 168. Similarities to points made in the speeches of Micajah Perry suggest that he is the author. 169. An account (9 April 1733) in PRO T.38/364 shows that Edward Randolph was then "in Goal & the Sureties insolvent." He originally owed the government £18,397 but this had been reduced to £ 10,123. The possessor of another famous Virginia name, Arthur Lee, had failed some years before and the £9,613 he still owed the Crown was considered lost. Arthur Lee was the son of Francis Lee (d. 1714), merchant of London, son of Richard Lee (I) of Virginia. The only other big loss since 1720 was John Midford, who had died insolvent owing the Crown £17,134, which had since been reduced to about £6000. 170. Considerations Relating to the Tobacco Trade, p. 2. 171. Including: A Letter from a Member of Parliament to His Friends in the Country, Concerning the Duties on Wine and Tobacco (London, 1733); Some General Considerations Concerning the Alteration and Improvement of the Public Revenuws (London, 1733); and A Vindication of the Conduct of the Ministry in the Scheme of the Excise of Wine and Tobacco (London, 1734).

IX THE CONDUCT OF THE SEVEN YEARS WAR Stephen B. Baxter

When students enquire at the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague about the surviving diplomatic materials, they are warned that the Dutch records are like an onion. The outermost layer consists of dispatches that were to be read by all the members of the States General. Peel that away, and there was a second layer of dispatches that were to be read by people who had a certain nuisance value, men who must be beguiled into thinking that they were "in the secret." Beneath that second layer is a third, or in rare cases a fourth, with the real news. A similar onion faces the student of Hanoverian political history, and many of those who start out reading in the period leave it in tears. The outermost layer in this field consists of the Memoirs of Hervey and Walpole and Dodington, the Letters of Walpole and Chesterfield and Frederick the Great. 1 All these works portray George II as a buffoon. All, as it happens, are acts of revenge, written after the author had been beaten by George II in a struggle for money or influence. Unfortunately for the student, such writings are on the whole vindictive nonsense. Yet they are so well done that they are studied for their own sake as literature. I have no objection to that, so long as we remember to define the 323

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word literature as fiction. George II was not an easy man to live with, and he did not begin to be appreciated at his true worth until people had had some experience with his successor. Contemporary memoirs and letters can only be used occasionally in the study of the administrative history of this period, and then only with great caution. When we discard the outermost layer of this onion, the next thing to greet us is the work of the scholars of the generation that ended in, say, 1920. The work of Basil Williams, Julian Corbett, and their contemporaries is much more sophisticated than that of Hervey and Walpole. Ostensibly, at least, it was based on original sources, and it was certainly cloaked in a pompous and magisterial prose style. Writers of that generation were given far more generous word limits than you and I get from our publishers today, so that the very weight of these books made them impressive. These people were in fact just as interested in what they wrote as Hervey and Walpole had been. A good many of them were Liberals; even those who were not could not escape the drama of the long struggle to mend or end the House of Lords. This was a generation that put up a statue of Oliver Cromwell, that dictator, outside the House of Commons without recognizing any incongruity. Why? Because Oliver had been also an enemy of the hereditary principle. He must therefore have been a friend of the people. Morley, a Liberal cabinet minister, wrote a Life of Cromwell as well as one of Gladstone. Rosebery, a Liberal prime minister, wrote a Life of the younger Pitt. And it is never safe to forget that Basil Williams, whose dead hand lay so heavy for so long on Hanoverian England, came out of Milner's Kindergarten. We may, and I think we do, owe that generation of scholars a great deal, but we must never make the mistake of taking their work at face value. 1 A third layer of the onion consists of the writings of Sir Lewis Namier, Romney Sedgwick, and their epigones.3 For many years criticism of this group of scholars was unthinkable, and even today it remains an important school. But it is, I think, fair comment to point out that The Structure of Politics appeared in 1929 and England in the Age of the American Revolution in 1930, that is, half a century ago. Namier was Polish, and it has been remarked often enough that he thought in terms of the aristocratic Polish republic of the eighteenth century, one in which a king

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had very little authority and—most of the time—even less wisdom. Both Namier and Sedgwick seem to have entertained a personal dislike of George III, who did sometimes veer away from strict truthfulness in his conversation; and they seem to have been shocked by one of his early letters to Lord Bute in which the young man called his Groom of the Stole "My dearest." 4 Now this was a generation obsessed by vice, which was not indeed entirely unknown in Bloomsbury, and it was all too easy to picture the prince of Wales as a young Alexander with Lord Bute as his Hephaestion, or at least his Fruity Metcalfe. Unfortunately for Namier's memory, it now appears that he knew very little about English history outside the twenty years—precisely the period 1760 to 1780—of which he made himself a master. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that the prince wrote in a hurry and dropped the third word from the ordinary "My dearest Lord" or "My dearest friend," which were standard forms of address in the first half of the century, forms entirely lacking any sexual overtones. Perhaps we may even, through our tears, discern something like a fourth layer of the onion lurking beneath the work of Namier and Sedgwick. This would be the increasing emphasis on collective biography and on social history which has overtaken the profession in the years since World War II. Namier contributed to this himself, of course, with his History of Parliament Trust, but there is also a political element to be considered. A school that traces its origins to Tolstoi's War and Peace with its hatred of the hero and its exaltation of "necessity," and which has been reinforced by E. H. Carr's dislike of King Alexander's monkey, does not care for the older forms of historical writing. You recall perhaps that in the year 1920 his pet monkey bit King Alexander of Greece, who died of it. There ensued a civil war, and Winston Churchill chose to say that the monkey had caused a quarter of a million deaths. E. H. Carr, in What is History f, was not having any of that. Such accidents occur; they may well have significant consequences, but it is impossible to derive a rational scheme of history from them. Such an attitude takes care of individual biographies and also of the older forms of historical writing —political, diplomatic, constitutional—in favor of work on crime, children, rural bastardy rates, and so on. Even those reactionary souls who venture into biography, such as J. H. Plumb

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and Reed Browning, though they are willing to illustrate the operations of a ruling class, are not willing to penetrate into the harem and tell us what the sultan was up to. Both of them write history with the king left out, and some of the results are pretty extraordinary. But few present-day scholars are willing to go nearly so far as Plumb or Browning. Perhaps, when we have peeled all these layers from the onion, there will remain only a void. We may hope, however, to find an updated version of Ranke's Geschichte we es ist eigentlich gewesen, and to have an opportunity to see how the system actually worked. It is all most undemocratic, but it does happen to be the case that the Seven Years War stopped for five days on one occasion when the duchess of Newcastle was ill and her husband stayed by her bedside.* I am rather afraid that in western history, at least until the time of the French Revolution, the digestive problems of a duchess of Newcastle are of greater significance to the short-term conduct of affairs than Tolstoi or E. H. Carr would admit. In their own Russian field, the conduct of the Seven Years War depended, as it happens, on the equally fascinating question of the health of the Empress Elizabeth. England was willing to go to war in 1755 and 1756, to a curious extent, on the basis of a gamble that the tsaritsa was about to die. A present of ten thousand pounds to the Grand Duchess Catherine was thought likely to square the next Russian court. And it was a matter of real dismay to the Western powers that the Empress Elizabeth survived until January of 1762, while their friend Ferdinand VI of Spain died in August of 1759. Those who feel that the role of accident in history is not worth studying might ponder on what would have happened had Elizabeth died in 1759 and Ferdinand in 1762, or what would have happened had both of them lived on into the mid-sixties. Those particular might-have-beens do not concern us here. I would like to point out, however, that the current interest in collective biography and in social history gives us a skewed picture of the way in which political and diplomatic England really worked in the eighteenth century. Five hundred fifty-eight men in the House of Commons did not read the foreign dispatches nor did the 180-odd members of the House of Lords. At the very top there were between three and six people who were "in the circulation," with larger meetings of sixteen, at most, in moments of

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crisis, and when one is dealing with groups this small, questions of health and other accidental factors do come into play. Contemporaries certainly did not think in terms of the History of Parliament Trust. They thought in terms of courts, through which one manipulated blocs that would otherwise have been of unmanageable size. No one had time to negotiate with seven hundred individuals, and then with others outside the two houses of Parliament. "All countries have their Pits, & their Fox's, but with proper resolution, & management, that can be withstood every where." 6 As late as 1755, neither Pitt nor Fox was "in the circulation," and George II retained a modified freedom of action through the operation of what I have ventured to call the departmental system and what Ragnhild Hatton calls closet government. Its operation can be seen most clearly when the king was in Germany, for then the component parts were separated and the functions of each can be observed in isolation. In 1750, for example, the French ambassador asked permission to attend George II in Hanover during the coming holidays. When permission was denied, the ambassador asked for and received permission to take a vacation in France. 7 Clearly, then, the government of England was not in London during the summer of 1750. But on that occasion, Newcastle was minister in attendance, and one is still left to ask whether the "government of England" is Newcastle or whether it is George II. A better example, perhaps, is the summer of 1755, when the cipher Holdernesse was minister in attendance and Newcastle remained in London. The basic decision for war had been taken in the previous year. Braddock's secret instructions made war inevitable, and although they were approved by the cabinet, they were also approved by the king. George II not only retained the right to assign or withhold business from the cabinet, but also retained the right to say which ministers should attend individual meetings, and at least on occasion the right to change his mind on matters after a cabinet minute had been sent him. Both military and diplomatic correspondence were handled outside the cabinet, and so too were the more delicate political maneuvers. When he was in a bad mood George II could argue that there was no such thing as a first minister in the English system.* This was of course not true,

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and we may perhaps agree with those observers who argued that Newcastle was first minister during his brother's lifetime and that he remained first minister on the death of Henry Pelham in March of 1754. 9 But even Newcastle had very little influence over the military department, which was in the hands of the king's son the duke of Cumberland, and he could not prevent the king from being enthusiastic for the war to begin. Nor could he prevent the Hanover voyage of 1755, though it came at a particularly awkward moment for the English ministers. The trip to Germany was to be the king's last, as it happened, and he made the most of it. By forbidding outsiders to come, George could achieve a much less formal etiquette than the one that surrounded him in England. There he had his coin collection and his stud, his Gartentheater with its flats composed of rows of trees punctuated by gilded marble busts. The latest French plays were sent him in the diplomatic pouch, so that they could be performed in this delightful outdoor setting at Herrenhausen. When he went indoors, it was to permit the six leading courtiers to sit at table with him every day at one o'clock when he dined with the countess of Yarmouth. Although he was nearly seventy-two, the king "eats with a better appetite than any of us and is, thank God, as well as ever I saw him. The only change I can perceive is, that I think he does not hear quite so well." He refused to be bothered by Braddock's failures in America. Braddock had certainly neglected the common rules of war, George felt, but that was not his responsibility: "he wash'd his hands of it as he did not choose him, for that his son had recommended him, and he owned he had been surprised at it, at the time." 10 Such an interpretation of the departmental system may well seem extravagant, even for a m a n who loved to delegate, even for a very old man. And in 1755 George II was a very old man for a king, the oldest living sovereign since the Norman Conquest. Deafness was not quite his only problem. He was beginning to have trouble with his eyesight, and later that autumn he would ask all his servants to use darker ink when they wrote to him. From this point on we might easily be confused about what constituted the royal diet of letters. For there exist in all collections documents written in a large round hand, with very black ink, and one might well conclude that these were the only papers the king read after the autumn of 1755. In fact he continued to read

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everything: the ostensibles, the ordinary letters, the secrets, the most secrets or entre-nous, the little notes that ended with the command, "Burn this letter" and which no one, for that very reason, ever dared to burn. When he was tired, his secretaries or Lady Yarmouth could read to him, but the quantity of material the king processed by himself amazed his physicians. On one day in 1758 when he was in bed with fever and eye trouble, he had to go through nine dispatch boxes full of papers, and the doctors complained rightly enough that this did his eyes no good at all. 11 The daily work load of George II was so heavy that some kind of organization was essential. Fortunately, this king was very much more businesslike than his father had been. Until June of 1727, Lord Townshend could get away with some very sloppy filing of important state papers. From then on, presumably at the command of the new king, the state papers are much better kept, and they survive in much better order—even though Townshend was still minister. George II set a rigid schedule for himself as well as for others, and it was commonly said that you could set your watch by him. We probably all remember accounts of his daily calls on his mistress Lady Suffolk, which took place precisely at 7:00 P.M. If by any chance he came a few minutes early, the king would pace up and down outside the door of her apartment, his own watch in his hand. It is a ridiculous picture, and both Lady Suffolk and the rest of the court were bored by it all, but the rigid schedule was the key to the king's life. And it may help us to take a look at a few aspects of it here. Hanoverian England moved at a slower pace than we do now. Normally speaking, the continental mails came in twice a week, although there were of course expresses when something important was going on. These were read by the king, and some of them were handed on to the ministers who were in the circulation. Not all of them, ever; George II knew how to keep his own secret. Hanoverian matters were handled by the German chancery, but papers that might affect England were normally passed to a secretary of state. The efficient cabinet would think up a reply which the secretary would draft and then read to the king. After this was approved, the text might still be amended in the copying stage, and this of course gave opportunities for an unscrupulous secretary to try to change policy. Thus, in 1758 and 1759 the king and the duke of Newcastle were afraid that Den-

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mark might enter the war and perhaps even get the Dutch to join them, because of the misconduct of the English privateers and the even worse misconduct of the English Admiralty Courts. Both king and duke wanted the Dutch to be treated kindly, and they were able to get cabinet support for their attitude. Yet Holdernesse, who would draft the relevant dispatch, was a hardliner whose letter turned out to be at variance with the agreed policy. 12 That particular gaffe could be corrected because the king maintained a secret channel of communication with his ambassador at The Hague, as he maintained another secret channel of communication with Frederick the Great. His grandson was not so experienced, and in 1761 the needless rudeness of one of Secretary Egremont's dispatches to Madrid was thought to have been the immediate cause of the outbreak of war with Spain. Again, Egremont's dispatch seems to have been sent off without proper consultation. A young king could not control the errors of a young secretary, but not too much damage was done. There would have been a Spanish war sooner or later, in any case. English court etiquette did not permit George II to dine with his servants when he was in England, at least not "upstairs" in his own part of his palaces. It was also the rule that ministers went to court on a fixed schedule. Going on an unscheduled day could cause alarm, for it meant that something was wrong. T h e king liked to go to Richmond on Saturdays and on one day—either Wednesday or Thursday—in midweek. His minister, the duke of Newcastle, left London for his villa at Claremont on Friday afternoons and refused to return for the king's Sunday working sessions. Thus, the Seven Years War was perhaps the only war in English history to have been fought on the basis of a four-day week. Normally, cabinets met on Monday evening at seven, or later in the war on Tuesday evenings, but several members of the efficient cabinet were old, and some were ill. A good deal of work therefore had to be done in writing, and it is to this that we owe our knowledge of how the system operated. If it happened to be a minister's day, he went upstairs to the king's closet, his office, which was on the piano nobile of St. James's, or Kensington, or Hampton Court. There he apparently stood while the king transacted what business the king chose to transact. George II was an impatient man who loathed long speeches or ceremonies. If a preacher dared to go over the fifteen-

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minute limit with his sermon, there was sure to be a complaint sent to the archbishop of Canterbury. If Hardwicke wrote a long speech from the throne, the king would insist that it be cut before he would deliver it. But he does seem to have enjoyed reading the triple sets of dispatches that were sent to him from foreign courts and, when he was at Hanover, from London as well. These correspond to the layers of the Dutch onion, and the system may well have been derived from the Dutch example. The ostensibles could be shown to the outer cabinet or, when the king was abroad, to the regency; the regular letters were intended for, or written by, what Sir Lewis Namier called the "efficient cabinet," a group of four to six men, depending on the administration of the moment. The most secret layer of the correspondence was to be read only by Newcastle and by Chancellor Hardwicke, if by anyone in England. In May of 1755 the Hanoverian government was not transmitting its secret intelligence to Newcastle, while Newcastle was not transmitting his in-letters to the duke of Cumberland." Cumberland was not only the king's son but also the head of the army. During this summer the regency often met in his apartments at St. James's. But it would not have been proper for such an exalted person to attend meetings of the efficient cabinet, even had Newcastle liked him; and the two men happened to disagree on many of the issues of the day. Newcastle took the position that Cumberland had the military power, and that he would become a threat to the constitution if he held the civil power with it. For Newcastle thought in terms of patronage, and to him places were power. If he could make Barrington secretary at war without telling Cumberland, much less asking his advice, then Newcastle's position as the minister would be evident. If he failed to get his own man appoined dean of Gloucester he was ready to resign, because it was a public demonstration that he was out of favor with the closet. 14 Ministers needed such public demonstrations of support. Unfortunately, the closet was often in a bad humor or took things the wrong way when new business was first mentioned. This posed problems, and there were also occasions when George II did not wish a minister to speak on some topic outside his particular department. It was a contravention of etiquette, furthermore, to mention the same topic twice in a single audience. For what we

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call extended remarks and the English call supplementaries, it would be necessary for a minister to go downstairs at the end of the audience and explain the matter to Lady Yarmouth. It was better to do so anyway, even when the king was in a good humour, because what took place in the Closet was binding on King and minister alike, even though it was oral. Repetition of a discussion with the king to Lady Yarmouth made it safer for the minister concerned, even though George II had a truly royal memory. When he happened to be in a bad mood, or took things the wrong way, then recourse to Lady Yarmouth could often bring about a change of view. Amelie de Walmoden was also very good at hinting what the king was too polite to say for himself, and she had, as it happens, her own correspondence with her relatives, who occupied important positions on the Continent. Her influence on society may have been deleterious: an increase in divorce and in more or less irregular domestic arrangements is to be noted at the highest levels of society after her arrival in England in 1737. Her influence on the course of government was immense and it was almost entirely benign. Another essential person in government was P. A. Baron von Münchhausen, the Hanoverian minister. On occasion he would sit in on meetings of the English efficient cabinet, as Newcastle or Holdernesse would sit in on meetings of the Hanover cabinet when they were in Germany. Usually the two governments were in precise agreement, that is, in general the Hanover ministry danced to the English tune. This was not the case in 1755 or later, and even when the two governments did have a single policy, the king had greater freedom of action in Germany than he did when he was in England. He was also easier to get at. Thus, Frederick II of Prussia chose the Hanover holiday of 1755 as the moment to try to make friends with his uncle. For fifteen years he had been trying in vain to make an alliance, or even to obtain an interview. Now his chance had come. Through his sister the duchess of Brunswick, he suggested the possibility of a marriage between a Brunswick princess and the prince of Wales." It was one of those delightful anachronisms that were known to captivate George II. A dynastic marriage in which the bride would bring a Prussian alliance for her dowry would titillate the old king. Whatever we may think of the royal power in 1755, it is a matter of observation that Frederick II had been trying to get an English alliance ever since 1740, and that much of

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the English political world had been trying to get a Prussian alliance for an even longer time, with absolutely no success. George II would not hear of one, on any reasonable terms. Only when he was approached by the Brunswicks with the offer of their daughter did his heart soften. The alliance would be made in January of 1756; and it is worth remembering, perhaps, that the Diplomatic Revolution was first delayed and then worked out by George II as a personal act, this time without Newcastle. The role of the English government was limited. All concerned may very well have been playing games so as to humor the old gentleman; but unless George II was humored, there would be no Diplomatic Revolution. It is fair to say, putting it at its lowest, that he retained a veto on the formulation of foreign and military policy. The coming of war made it possible for various politicians to exercise vetoes of their own, for they knew that the king would need them. Thus Speaker Onslow, among others, had a veto over the government's tax proposals which he exercised from time to time. 16 Whoever was the king's minister for the House of Commons would have such a veto, if he dared to use it, by refusing to bring in proposals with which he disagreed. Even Henry Bilson Legge, the chancellor of the exchequer, refused in August to sign the warrants needed to implement a Hessian subsidy treaty that had been negotiated by Holdemesse at Hanover. 17 As it happens, the king had played fair; he had not told either the Hanoverian or the Hessian government the price that as king he was willing to pay for the Hessians, and therefore Holdernesse had been able to make a good bargain. But it was not good enough for Legge or for William Pitt, and both men opposed the subsidy treaty. The king's weakness became greater at the time of the French attack on Minorca in the spring of 1756. The London government knew of the possibility of an attack before the end of January, and even the languid administration of the island itself knew enough to start a council of war on February 5 . " Unfortunately, very little could be done for Minorca, for the mother country was also threatened with a possible invasion. Just enough help was in fact sent off, in time, with orders to pick up additional men at Gibraltar. But Governor Fowke at Gibraltar would not lend the needed regiments, Byng certainly did not show much vigor against Galisonniere, and Minorca was lost in a particularly humiliating fashion. I get into trouble with my friends in London when I suggest

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that, for the aristocracy, the Enlightenment signified a period of glorious disobedience, an era in which they did not perform the tasks for which they were paid. But that is exactly what was happening. In the military arena, George II was in a position to resent such disobedience. Fowke was cashiered for not lending the Gibraltar regiments. Byng was shot for his pains, and I think we must agree with Newcastle that his execution was another personal act of the king. At much the same time, a young captain who ran his ship into port without orders to refit, Lord Harry Paulet, lost the king's favor and never held another command. 1 * In the short run, ruining Paulet cost the king three votes in Parliament, and in time Lord Harry became sixth duke of Bolton. But he never held another command once George II convinced himself that Paulet might be a coward. In the political world the king had no such authority even before the loss of Minorca, and after it he was in serious difficulties. In October, Henry Fox resigned as secretary, in the hope of ruining Newcastle and weakening the king's military authority. Newcastle was clever enough to resign himself, the first and perhaps the only prime minister to resign with a majority of 150. He was replaced by his friend the fourth duke of Devonshire, with William Pitt as secretary of state. Devonshire, the proprietor of one of England's great fortunes, had a private spy ring operating inside France; but he was clearly not the man of the hour, nor was Pitt. At this time the minister of the day was expected to give a levée at least twice a week so that the hungry might have an opportunity to ask for the loaves and the fishes. During the Devonshire ministry the levée was held at Lady Yarmouth's apartments, for no one knew where else to go. If Mrs. Thatcher looks into the matter, she may find that she is only the second female prime minister. Technically the job was Devonshire's; but he did not want it, or like it, and he saw to it that Newcastle, unlike Pitt, was kept informed of the thread of affairs, so that he could resume office without awkwardness. This ministry was so weak that foreign ambassadors were told that England's foreign policy was still being conducted by Newcastle, even though he was out of office. 11 His return was merely a matter of timing. Newcastle wanted the supplies voted for the year, and the investigation into the Minorca disaster out of the way, before he would come back. And he would not come back at all without the support of both the king and the prince of Wales.

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Only if the two courts were united behind him could he act with authority.** When the king became impatient and precipitated a crisis in April, Newcastle still refused to move, and it was not until the middle of June that all the details were ironed out. Then he returned to office as first lord of the treasury and as prime minister and held those places until the end of the reign, supported, if needed, by the prince of Wales and by Lady Yarmouth. One of Newcastle's demands had been that Pitt resume office as secretary of state, rather than Henry Fox. The king would have preferred Fox and warned with a sneer that in any combined administration Newcastle would be nothing more than Mr. Pitt's clerk. Certainly Pitt tried to claim all the credit for himself, and too many scholars have taken his blustering at face value. Pitt was not in charge of the war as a whole. As secretary for the Southern Department he was in charge of the American theater, and it was also his duty to issue the orders to fleet commanders as well. The orders went out over his signature. But they had been hammered out in cabinet, and they represented the joint wisdom of the combined administration. A good many of the better ideas came from Hardwicke. Pitt excelled as an administrator, that is, in getting the orders of the cabinet carried out. He excelled also, at least at times, in the design of particular operations such as the assault on Martinique and Guadeloupe, which he devised working together with Mr. Cleveland of the admiralty.** But their plan had to obtain cabinet approval before it could be put into effect, and neither Pitt nor Mr. Cleveland was ever prime minister in this reign. The administration continued to operate on the departmental system, and, much to everyone's surprise, it was Newcastle rather than Pitt who had the ear of Lord Bute. When in 1758 a breach occurred between Leicester House and the ministry, it was a break with Pitt and not with Newcastle. And toward the end it is clear that Newcastle was losing favor with George II as he held his own at Leicester House. I am sure he knew what he was doing. It did not take the regular warnings of Chesterfield to remind him that the prince of Wales was fifty-five years younger than his grandfather. In 1755 Newcastle had not forced the prince of Wales to marry his princess of Brunswick in order to cement the Prussian alliance. When he found that the young lady would be personally distasteful to Prince George, Newcastle dropped her and by so

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doing gained the favor of the prince and of the dowager princess as well. Then Newcastle persuaded the king to give the prince £40,000 a year as an eighteenth birthday present. This was handsome enough, since Prince Frederick had only been given £24,000 a year when he started out. But George announced that, grateful as he was for the £40,000, he would really prefer to continue to live at home with his mother; and he would like to have Bute appointed his groom of the stole. The king rejected both requests and was at first prepared to be firm. But the loss of Minorca so weakened the king's position that by September of 1756 the prince of Wales had his money and his mother and his groom of the stole." If Pitt is considered to be the favorite of Leicester House, that is true as against Fox; but not as against the duke of Newcastle, who was thought to be an old crook but was admittedly an indispensable old crook, at least during the lifetime of George II. What did surprise Bute and the prince was being told in December of 1758, not that Newcastle was currently prime minister—that they knew—but being told by Pitt that it would be a good idea for him to continue in office into the new reign.*5 Leicester House was startled, but the idea was not to be forgotten. A host of scholars have failed to remember it, most recently Professor Browning, whose biography of Newcastle is in some ways calamitous.*4 We need not rely merely on the word of the elder Pitt, a notorious liar. We can, if we like, examine a few test cases and see how they turned out. But we should always remember that the king's health was breaking and that as it failed, not only he but his entire generation lost power. Newcastle and Hardwicke might take very good care of Leicester House. They could never become companions of the young prince, for the gap in age was far too great. It was at best a relationship like that between Glubb Pasha and the young king of Jordan, bound to end unhappily. As for the king, there was one bout of fever in 1756 and there were three more of them in 1758. The illness of February 1759 was so bad that George II gave a packet of bank bills to Lady Yarmouth, a sign that they both thought he was dying.*7 Each of the king's illnesses weakened Newcastle. He might well continue to be first lord of the treasury into a new reign; but Bute would be minister, whatever office he might choose to accept. Let us take a few specific examples to illustrate the position.

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When Cumberland was ruined in the autumn of 1757, the voice of the nation demanded that he be replaced by Sir John Ligonier. Newcastle, the prince of Wales, and Pitt all agreed that Ligonier was the man. Then Newcastle went into the closet and secured the appointment. From then on Newcastle had an increasing share of military patronage, for Ligonier was not nearly so strong as Cumberland had been. Some of Newcastle's choices, such as that of Amherst for the American command, were distinctly superior to the candidates proposed by Pitt.*8 In the European theater, at least, Pitt could do very little. Thus, when the duke of Marlborough was going out as commander-in-chief of an expeditionary force to the continent and needed a secretary, he wrote both to Newcastle and to Pitt. It was Newcastle who got the right man appointed, and when Marlborough died it was, once again, Newcastle who named his replacement. By no means all the appointees had Leicester House support. Even fewer of them had Ligonier's support, and often he was informed about an appointment in his department twenty-four hours after the appointment had gone through.* 9 On political issues, the factions in the combined administration went their own way, but Newcastle's faction tended to win. Thus his party opposed the militia bill and held it up for a year. Pitt's attempt to expand the definition of habeas corpus was a much more serious affair. George II spoke out against the Habeas Corpus Bill in the Circle and Newcastle had it thrown out by the House of Lords, even though it seemed for a time that the government might fall. Pitt blustered and threatened and tried to bully Lady Yarmouth. That doughty soul had far more political courage than the king, and when Pitt tried blackmail—more money for Hesse in return for the bill—she became so angry that she refused even to pass the message on. The bill did not go through. 80 And on patronage matters, about which Pitt cared far more deeply than he would like us to think, he did badly. When the archbishop of Canterbury died, it was significant to both men, not only that Newcastle got Seeker appointed but that he was able to do so without consulting Pitt. Bitterly, but with a fitting sense of humor, the secretary of state then asked Newcastle to get him a prebend's place at Windsor.®1 In 1759 the mother country was stripped of men and equipment for the great assault on Canada. Usually large forces had to

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be kept at home in relative idleness, not so much to ward off a French attack as to sooth the nerves of the City. Throughout this administration, the king had continued to maintain his private intelligence operations and his private lines of communication; so had Newcastle, and so, apparently, had Devonshire. But the royal lines were the dangerous ones, for the king could use them at any time to make a separate peace. Both in 1758 and in 1759 he was negotiating on his own account with Vienna, as it happened, and meanwhile he was finding out much more news than Pitt could. The king's sources indicated the possibility of a combined Danish and Dutch attack on the British Isles." Pitt had always resented these royal channels of communication, but there were many of them of which he was unaware. And they were dangerous: George II did not agree with his English ministers about the purpose of the Seven Years War. He wanted to evict the French from the soil of North America, and on this topic Pitt came to agree with him while Hardwicke and Newcastle opposed him. They were much more afraid than the king and Pitt of the social consequences of wartime inflation." The king's other war aim was a reparation for his German losses. An indemnity in money would be of frightening size, since it could be demonstrated that as elector, George's personal war losses exceeded two and a half million pounds sterling. A dédommagement en terres et hommes, which the king was trying to get from Vienna in 1759, would mean the acquisition of the bishoprics of Osnabrück, Paderborn, and Hildesheim, that is, a Greater Hanover somewhat resembling the one of 1815. Alternatively George II might be willing to accept East Friesland, whose inheritance had been taken from him by Frederick the Great in 1744.34 Any territorial indemnity would change Hanover from a detestable electorate into a middling German, and indeed a middling European, power. It might well become a counter to the growing power of Prussia in the north, and Frederick was quick enough to recognize these ideas as a personal threat. He betrayed his uncle's plan to the English ministry in the hope of spoiling it. But it is quite possible that George II might have had his way had he lived to the end of the war. It is to this accident, that George II died just when he did, that England owed an outcome of the war so favorable to herself and so unfavorable to Hanover. So far as the American theater was concerned, the king agreed

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with Pitt rather than with Newcastle and Hardwicke, and there is much evidence to indicate that Pitt's favor and influence in the Closet were increasing in 1759 and 1760 for just this reason. The third duke of Grafton thought that if the old king had lived, he would have made Pitt his minister. 55 But in 1759 Pitt did not believe in the possibility of a naval attack by Denmark and Sweden, because his own intelligence sources did not discuss anything other than the appalling economic collapse going on inside France and the low morale of her armies. ,s Thus, it became necessary to show Pitt the secret dispatches and intercepts, of whose existence he had never been told. Everyone was frightened to tell him, and at first there was an attempt to falsify the dates. In the end Pitt was told the whole story, and at first he kept his temper." This was his way. Some months later there was a tremendous explosion about one particular link in the royal system, Joseph Yorke's secret work at The Hague. But Pitt seems never to have discovered all the channels of secret information, nor ever to have succeeded in stopping all of them. Another very large area in which Pitt did not operate as master was that of money. It is a pity that students do not take Newcastle more seriously. He was not only efficient enough to run the Seven Years War on the basis of a four-day week, surely an administrative triumph in itself, but he was also able to pay for it at 4 percent, and in the early years of the war at 3 . What other English prime minister ever did as well? Now, of course, the term Newcastle comprises not only the individual Thomas Pelham-Holles but also several different teams of experts without whose approval Thomas Pelham-Holles would not move. In diplomatic matters he had frequently used a small committee of resident foreign ambassadors against his own cabinet colleagues. At this time the committee was down to the single person of Count Viry, a remarkable intriguer who was the Sardinian envoy. On political matters Newcastle would consult not only Hardwicke but also a kitchen cabinet that usually included Sir Thomas Robinson, Andrew Stone, William Murray, and in later years the fourth duke of Devonshire. Apart from such consultations in committee, Newcastle was also careful to take soundings from a number of country gentlemen by mail. For a man who had never sat in the House of Commons it was particularly important to keep in close touch with public opinion; and on the whole it must be said that

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he knew a great deal about it, often more than his rivals. On financial matters he had no rivals. He consulted not only the gentlemen of the Bank of England, and such men as Sir John Barnard and Samson Gideon; he got much of his advice from Mr. West of the treasury. Newcastle did not take advice from Pitt, or from Pitt's friend Beckford, or from Henry Bilson Legge, the rather pathetic chancellor of the exchequer. Without advice from Pitt or from Legge, Newcastle turned in his best performance as a financier. Pitt did not care for this at all and had tried to demand a majority of the treasury board in the ministry of 1757, three seats out of five. It was this demand that cause the "interregnum" to last for three months, from April until the middle of June. Pitt ended up with one seat, not three. What he retained was veto power, which he exercised to prevent the imposition of taxes on sugar. But Speaker Onslow also had veto power on tax questions and was also willing to use it. And if Pitt went beyond a veto and tried to attack Legge or Newcastle, which he did from time to time, he would be stopped by the disapproval of Leicester House. In time, Legge came to resent his humiliating situation, and in order to be tactful, Newcastle permitted him to present his own financial proposals in 1759. This happened to coincide with the one real period of financial stringency during the war years. Frederick the Great had troubled the money market by buying up gold, which he proposed to use to issue a debased coinage. Then the Dutch chose this moment to withdraw their investment in the English stocks, and the combination was too much for the bank. It had to buy gold bullion at a premium of 3 percent in order to have it minted, or else England would have to go off the gold standard. And no one can buy at 103 in order to sell at par for very long. It was soon clear to the financial world that, while Newcastle could save this country, no one else could, and Legge's reputation was blasted. Ever since 1689 the moneyed interest had tried to influence the formation of policy. Crude attempts were made to blackmail William and Mary, some of them by Thomas Pelham of Laughton. 3 * Whether Newcastle had learned the technique at his father's knee or no, he had certainly learned it somewhere. On the accession of George III, the new king kept his grandfather's ministers, but at first he talked of the changes he would be making after the first

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six months. Newcastle bowed his head and made no bargains for himself. His official attitude was that he was perfectly willing to run errands for Bute, without reward. Unfortunately, however, the financial community would not lend the money needed for the year 1761 unless assurance was given that the duke would remain in office for more than the year itself." Clearly Newcastle had the votes, not only of the House of Commons but of the City counting houses as well. Administration could not do without him until he was betrayed by Mr. Martin of the treasury on a technical matter in May of 1762, and then he did resign. One place where votes did not normally count was at meetings of the efficient cabinet. In 1747 and 1748, as I have pointed out on another occasion, Newcastle had been outvoted in the efficient cabinet by 3-1, and yet his policy had prevailed. 40 In the year after Henry Pelham's death, votes were infrequent, for at that time the efficient cabinet was really limited to Newcastle and Hardwicke. During the Devonshire-Pitt administration of 1756, there was a little more voting. Pitt seems to have believed in votes where Newcastle and the king were consensus politicians, but the administrative procedure of such a ministry would not set any precedents. A new situation arose, however, with the combined ministry of June 1757. Newcastle's people and Pitt's people disagreed on major issues, and how were conflicts to be reconciled if not by voting? On balance Newcastle won most of the battles and, in particular, he won on the issue of voting. He knew very well that his work in the closet could not be carried on unless most of the advice given to the king was the unanimous voice of the ministry. Nothing less powerful would sway the king's mind. Therefore, an informal bargain was struck. Newcastle spoke well of Pitt in the closet, as Lady Yarmouth did below stairs, and between them they made his court for him—no easy task at first. Pitt for his part had to give in on most of the issues, not only on the German issue, where he had to swallow everything he had been saying for twenty years, but also surrender on his liberal interpretation of the law, and on men. By now, establishment Whigs had become quite reactionary on legal issues, and among establishment Whigs Hardwicke and William Murray, Lord Mansfield, were far to the right of the pack. Even Lord Keeper Henley was considered suspect by Newcastle, though no one else has ever been able to find the liberal spark in that quarter.

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In order to achieve harmony, Pitt and his friends were forced to postpone legal reform until after the end of the war. Indeed, Pitt went farther. When Newcastle complained of being alone in the efficient cabinet, and of the possibility of his being outvoted there, Pitt agreed to the addition of Hardwicke and in time of Mansfield and Halifax as ministers without portfolio. 41 This gave Newcastle such an overwhelming majority that votes were not heard of again until the new reign, and even then they did not matter much. Thus, on the famous occasion when Pitt and Temple resigned in 1761, they did so after the cabinet had voted unanimously against them. But this vote was taken just for the record, like a "tombstone" advertisement in the financial press recording a bond issue that has already been sold out. Pitt and Temple knew they were beaten, and that they were going to resign, well before the vote was taken. Later on, in the summer of 1762, Bute was once voted down by a unanimous cabinet. But at the next meeting, by which time it had been learned that Bute had the king's support, his measures went through. And if by chance they did not, as over the decision to return St. Lucia to the French, the cabinet might, if it pleased, insist on the retention of St. Lucia. Bute and Egremont simply let Viry assure the French that the island was theirs for the asking, and the negotiations proceeded on that basis.4* Votes did not matter, then, even during a combined administration. What did matter? Obviously, the mind of the king; and it is time for us to stop giggling about George II. Both in 1755 and in 1758 others wanted him to settle for less, but he insisted on the goal of evicting the French from the soil of North America. He won his point, and it is to George II as well as to Wolfe and Amherst that we owe the final victory. I would suggest, however, that this was one of the last meaningful survivals of the old system. For George III abandoned the German war in 1762, and with it any hope of securing a dédommagement there for himself. By doing so he ruined his finances. Later on in the century the military contribution of Hanover was limited to forces of some ten thousand men, and I know of no significant diplomatic activity by George III as elector. 41 In England he acted, as his grandfather had, as the operating head of the army and referred to it as his own department. He took over church patronage from his ministers. As a result, the church became far more aristocratic. But

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George III took so little interest in Europe that he did not bother to have his two eldest sons taught German, and his German chancery in London was allowed to fall into decay. Then when it was wanted there was none, and the king himself had to translate German-language documents for his English ministers with his own hand. A new age was dawning, an age of Indian and American empires, an age in which Europe was less important and so too were those who handled European matters—the secretaries of state and the sovereign himself. New men—home secretary, colonial secretary—would come into prominence as the older ones slowly faded into the background. George III did send his younger sons to Hanover for their education. But he sent his prize sheep to Australia and received from that continent a supply of kangaroos. His daughter longed for some to add to her private zoo; and so in the spring of 1800 a herd was sent off toward Württemberg with two couples of kangaroos. They arrived at much the same time as the French revolutionary armies and followed the duchess on her flight. Ultimately the duchess found a refuge for herself at Erlangen, where the beasts were put into a courtyard. 44 Here were royal beasts just as insignificant as King Alexander's monkey. The kangaroos did not even bite the duchess of Württemberg. By 1800 the old system had been dead for a generation. Its survival even into the 1760s seem to have been an artifice of Bute, a device for achieving the Peace of Paris. George Ill's letters in that period give no indication of an independent mind: he wrote, verbatim, what Bute told him to. The Peace of Paris is the last whisper of an older, seventeenth-century monarchy. 45 In its death throes it had given England not only a new empire but also a series of new administrative devices. A relatively insignificant Europe did not deserve two secretaries of state, and after many years of complaint, a single foreign secretary emerged in 1782, together with a single home secretary. A third secretary, for the colonies, should have been appointed as early as 1757 and would have been but for the protests of Pitt. Even more important was the establishment of the office of first lord of the treasury at the head of the government. I have been arguing for some years now, that as late as 1754 it was not clear whether or not the first lord of the treasury was the minister of the day. When Henry Pelham died on 6 March 1754, both the

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duke of Grafton and Henry Fox thought that Newcastle continued to be minister. He had, they thought, been minister as secretary and he continued to be minister after his move to the treasury. 4 ' Now, Fox and Grafton may have been wrong, but their evidence shows that the point was still in dispute in 1754. Eight years later, when Newcastle resigned, there could be no question. His work at the treasury had made that the first place. It was still possible for Bute to be in charge in 1760 without any office of business, and for him to be in charge in 1761 as secretary of state. But these were extraconstitutional anachronisms, with which the political world was most unhappy, and the situation did not become orderly until Bute followed Newcastle's example and took the treasury for himself. The long and, in domestic terms, successful ministry of Lord North consolidated the position; and so the process begun by Danby in the 1670s, and continued by Walpole, reached its conclusion. Very likely the process would have been slower without the Seven Years War. As we all know, war tends to accelerate developments in many fields, to throw up ideas not all of which can be absorbed at once. Thus, not only the Stamp Act but union with Ireland and a progressive income tax were all proposed during the Seven Years War. That George II and Newcastle did not adopt them is to their credit. Their administrative work was of permanent value, while their successors were to find out the hard way that there were reasons for not imposing a Stamp Act or a progressive income tax or a union with Ireland. It is time to stop giggling about both of them. NOTES [Place of publication is London except where otherwise stated.] 1. John, Lord Hervey, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick, S vols. (1931); Horace Walpole, Memoires of the last ten years of the reign of George the second, ed. Henry Fox, Lord Holland, 2 vols. (1822); The political journal of George Bubb Dodington, ed. John Carswell and Lewis Arnold Dralle (1965); The Yale edition of Horace Walpole's correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis et al. (New Haven, 1937-); The letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols. (1932); Oeuvres de Frédéric Le Grand, ed. J. D. E. Preuss, 31 vols, in 33 (Berlin, 1846-1857).

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2. Perhaps the worst offender in this group was Basil Williams, whose Chatham, 2 vols. (1913), Stanhope (1932), and The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760 (1939) misled two generations of students. Not too many people read Morley or Rosebery today, but Julian Corbett's England in the seven years war, 2 vols. (1907) badly needs to be replaced. 3. The hostility of Sedgwick, at least, to the Hanoverians goes back to his 1931 edition of Hervey's Memoirs. It continued to distort his interpretations right down through the publication of his The Commons 1715-1754 (1970). 4. Lewis B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), p. 108. 5. During the first week of October, 1756, B.L. Add. MS 32868, passim. 6. Newcastle to General Wall, Newcastle House, April 28, 1755, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32854, ff. 309-310. 7. Albemarle to Bedford, Paris, 28 March/8 April, 1750, B.L. Add. MS 33026, ff. 83-85. 8. Philip Chesney Yorke, The life and correspondence of Philip Yorke, earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, 3 vols. (1913), II, 223. 9. See n. 46. 10. Colonel Joseph Yorke to Lord Hardwicke, Helvoetsluys, September 13, 1755, Yorke, Hardwicke, II, 284-285. 11. Sir Edward Wilmot to Newcastle, Kensington, June 3, 1758, B.L. Add. MS 32880, f. 309. 12. Memorandums, Claremont, December 10, 1758, B.L. Add. MS 32886, ff. 250-251. The secret channel kept open at the king's command between Newcastle and Joseph Yorke at The Hague was much friendlier to the Dutch viewpoint, e.g., Newcastle to Major-General Joseph Yorke, November 17, 1758, Private, Copy, B.L. 32885, ff. 365370. 13. On the extraordinary situation in 1755, see Newcastle to Münchhausen, Claremont, May 23, 1755, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32855, ff. 140144; Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, p. 319; Henry Fox to Harrington, July 1, 1755, Copy, B.L. Add. 51383 D, f. 17. 14. And of course he was right to feel that way; but his attitude means that the king was more important than modern scholars such as Plumb and Browning are willing to admit. 15. Newcastle to Harrington, Claremont, Entre nous, Copy, June 6, 1755, B.L. Add. MS 32855, ff. 365-366; Holdernesse to Newcastle [Hanover], July 6, 1755, P:S: Entre nous, B.L. Add. MS 32856, f. 553. 16. See, e.g., in 1754, B.L. Add. MS 32995, f. 307. In 1759 Onslow had exceptional influence because of the great political and economic disturbances of that spring: Henry Bilson Legge to Newcastle, Downing Street, March 8, 1759, B.L. Add. MS 32888, f. 414; and J. West to Newcastle [April 18, 1759], B.L. Add. MS 32890, ff. 162-163. 17. Legge was not dismissed for this until November, when he spoke

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in the Commons against the treaty. It was thought at the time that Legge and Pitt acted as they did in expectation of a speedy demise of the crown. Hartington to Henry Fox, Dublin, November 8, 1755, B.L. Add. MS 51381, ff. 71-72. 18. A spy's report, dated Versailles January 26, 1756, and marked as received on February 7, is in the Newcastle Papers at B.L. Add. 32862, ff. 220-221. At Minorca the reports were so numerous that a general council of war sat from February 5. David Erskine, ed., Augustus Hervey'sJournal, pp. 190-191. 19. Anson to Newcastle, Admiralty June 10, 1756, B.L. Add. MS 32865, ff. 251-252. 20. B.L. Add. MS 32869, ff. 305 and 320-326. For the crowd at Lady Yarmouth's, see Hardwicke to Newcastle, Powis House, January 7, 1757, At night, B.L. Add. MS 32870, ff. 58-62. 21. When angry enough at the king, Newcastle was prepared to deny such stories. "Papers laid before the king, by Lord Waldegrave, [10 June] and return'd June 11th 1757," B.L. Add. MS 32871, ff. 272-273. 22. See, e.g., "Paper read by my Lord Waldegrave to the King," March 9, 1757, B.L. Add. MS 32870, ff. 250-251. The difficulties are illustrated by Henry Fox to Cumberland May 20, 1757, B.L. Add. MS 51375, ff. 107-108. The documentation on what was called at the time the "Interregnum" is of course enormous. 23. Newcastle to Hardwicke, Newcastle House Monday at night [September 4, 1758], Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32883, ff. 273-275. 24. The negotiations began in the spring and went on for months. For the early discussions, see B.L. Add. MS 32996, ff. 403-404. 25. B.L. Add. MS 32886, ff. 384-386 and 411. 26. Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (1975). 27. Royal Archives, Windsor, R.A. 52980, Note by George II of February 10, 1759, "Les billets de banque, que j'ai mis en dépôt entre les mains de M. la Comtesse de Yarmouth doivent lui appartenir après ma mort, comme un don que je lui en fais. "GEORGE R." I owe my dutiful thanks to Her Majesty the Queen for her gracious permission to work in these papers. 28. Pitt in 1757 preferred Lord Cornwallis and in 1758 was reluctant to abandon Abercrombie. Newcastle to Hardwicke, Claremont, September 3, 1757, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32873, ff. 432-435; same to same, Claremont, September 17, 1758, B.L. Add. MS 32884, ff. 27-36. 29. See on this B.L. Add. MS 32885, ff. 148 and passim. Marlborough's successor was Lord George Sackville, and it was doubly important to Newcastle that he, not Pitt, made the recommendation, while Ligonier was not informed for another twenty-four hours. 30. Horace Walpole, Mémoires, II, 295; Newcastle to Hardwicke, Claremont, May 16, 1758, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32880, ff. 96-103; same to same, May 21, 1758, ibid., ff. 170-176. 31. William Pitt to Newcastle, Wednesday evening March 29th [1758], B.L. Add. MS 32878, f. 420.

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32. Pitt of course turned out to be correct, but Steinberg's reports from Copenhagen were alarming. An amphibious attack on Scotland or alternatively on Ireland was the talk of London, entirely apart from the king's secret intelligence reports. S3. "Considerations on the present state of affairs at home, and abroad," Claremont, April 18 & 19, 1759, B.L. Add. MS 32890, ff. 130-151, especially ff. 138-142. 34. Newcastle to Hardwicke, Claremont, August 26, 1758, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32883, ff. 114-119; same to same, October 5, 1758, printed in Yorke, Hardwicke, III, 230-231; same to same, October 31, ibid., pp. 241-242; Andrew Mitchell to Newcastle, Dresden, December 11, 1758, Private, B.L. Add. MS 32886, ff. 256-259. Taking all of French North America had been in the air in 1755: Newcastle to Hardwicke, Claremont, August 4, 1755, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32857, ff. 568569. 35. Sir William R. Anson, ed., Autobiography and Political Correspondence of Augustus Henry Third Duke of Grafton (1898), p. 12. 36. Compare Pitt's intelligence reports in P.R.O. 30/8/87 with those in the Newcastle Papers. They seem accurate, but they are confined to France. Hardwicke was contemptuous: "In truth the Southern Department seems to have no channel of intelligence at all." Hardwicke to Newcastle, Grosvenor Square May 18, 1759, Friday morning, B.L. Add. MS 32891, f. 171. The Dutch agent T. Palairet, like Newcastle and Hardwicke, expected a landing either in Scotland or in Ireland. T. Palairet to the Raadpensionaris Steyn, London, July 13, 1759, Algemeen Rijks-Archief, The Hague, Familie Archief Stein, 24. 37. B.L. Add. MS 32891, ff. 358-359. 38. Thomas Pelham was made a lord of the treasury for his loans, and was fired twice, in 1692 and in 1699. See S. B. Baxter, The Development of the Treasury 1660-1702 (1957), p. 29. 39. "Points to be mentioned to Lord Bute," B.L. 32999, ff. 144-145, f. 145: "That the money'd men of the City had plainly told the Duke of Newcastle, that if he staid [on as First Lord of the Treasury], they would raise the money. But that, if he did continue, it must be with an appearance of duration; or otherwise they would not trust." 40. S. B. Baxter, "The Myth of the Grand Alliance in the Eighteenth Century," in Paul R. Sellin and Stephen B. Baxter, Anglo-Dutch Cross Currents in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1976). 41. Newcastle to Dupplin, Claremont, September 28, 1757, Copy, B.L. Add. MS 32874, ff. 353-358. 42. Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756-1766 (1939), pp. 118n and 124. 43. Professor Ian Christie tells me that he has put one of his students to work on the Fürstenbund episode of the 1780s. Professor Aspinall's splendid edition of The Later Correspondence of George III makes it clear that English ministers were neither consulted nor informed about that king's electoral activities.

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44. Charlotte Augusta Matilda, princess royal of Great Britain, duchess and later queen of Württemberg. On the kangaroos see A. Aspinall, ed., The Later Correspondence of George III, 3, 346, 378. The animals did well and reproduced themselves in captivity. 45. Or very nearly the last whisper. The Regency Bill of 1765 is an exceptionally archaic document both in form and in content. 46. Archdeacon Coxe reported the attitude of Henry Fox in his Memoirs of Horatio, Lord, Walpole, 3d ed. (1820), II, 346-347 but did not understand what he was reporting. Fortunately, Henry Fox's papers are now available in the British Library. As for Grafton, there is no room for misunderstanding. "From the late death of the respectable Mr. Pelham strong contentions had taken place between those statesmen who were entitled to have the lead. "Notwithstanding this state of things the Duke of Newcastle was still the Minister: because he was supported by the body of the Whigs; and he secured this preference by the confidence they had in the sincerity of his principles, and the disinterestedness of his character." Anson, ed., Autobiography and Political Correspondence of Augustus Henry Third Duke of Grafton, pp. 4, 5.

X THE NUMBER 45: A WILKITE POLITICAL SYMBOL John Brewer

Domestic political history of the Hanoverian era written in the last generation has, in the main, been the history of ministries and of party. Apart from electoral politics and the occasional study of pamphleteering, political activity "out of doors" has rarely been deemed worthy of serious scrutiny. Admittedly there are exceptions to this rule—most notably George Rude's discussions of the Georgian crowd1—but there are virtually no studies, apart from the writings of J . H. Plumb, Lucy Sutherland, and more recently of Paul Langford and Nicholas Rogers, which tackle the question of the relationship between the political world of St. James's and Westminster Hall, and the various forms of demotic expression.* The neglect of this problem seems to me to be largely explained by certain assumptions customarily made by eighteenth-century historians. It is, for example, a frequent supposition that Hanoverian political activity properly defined was limited to such instrumental acts within the formal political structure as jockeying for place and office, voting at the hustings and in Parliament, and sending petitions and instructions to Westminster. This, it is understood, is what politics were really about. Clearly all of these 349

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activities were central to la vie politique and to the exercise of power—a matter that has fascinated political historians almost as much as it obsessed and repelled the Hanoverian Englishman. But do these actions adequately delineate or describe political activity in its entirety; were they the only means by which to exercise political power? It is one of the purposes of this essay to demonstrate that eighteenth-century Englishmen of all ranks and classes would not have accepted such a circumscribed definition of politics and of the exercise of authority and that, in consequence, historians' understanding of the term "political" when applied to Hanoverian Britain is, as often as not, both too narrow, and ahistorical and reductionist. Such a constricted and anachronistic definition of politics and power is often accompanied in the literature by a reluctance to examine noninstitutional, and what are regarded as noninstrumental, forms of political expression because they do not conform to some preconceived notion of that ineluctable historical category, "public opinion." Just as those who have studied Georgian "party" have sometimes decided that there was no such animal in eighteenth-century England, because nothing resembling the monsters of modern Britain could be found in the Hanoverian political swamp,* so forms of political expression that were neither "modern" nor easily accommodated within current notions of representative politics have been overlooked or brushed aside. The problem created by such sins of omission is not simply one of partiality; the incompleteness of the political picture prevents us from understanding the nature and meaning of politics as a whole for Hanoverian Englishmen. If we are to know what politics and the exercise of authority meant, we need to include considerations of the full range of actions which Georgian Englishmen would have regarded as "political." This may seem a severe injunction and a very bold one in view of the narrowness of my subject in this essay. But the example of the Wilkite political symbol, the number 45, does provide us with both the evidence and the opportunity to work toward a redefinition of the nature of Hanoverian political activity. The number 45, of course, became notorious through association with John Wilkes. In April 1764, immediately after the resignation of the Scottish favorite John Stuart, Earl of Bute, Wilkes published the forty-fifth number of his acerbic, chauvinist, and

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insulting opposition paper, the North Briton. Number 45 was, in fact, a good deal more temperate and much less personally vindictive than early numbers of the journal, but it attacked the king's speech made at the opening of Parliament and thereby goaded the government (which had already contemplated legal action) into prosecuting the paper and its publishers.4 This decision triggered a series of events, too well known to bear reiteration here, but which made Wilkes a popular hero and martyr, and the eponymous leader of a somewhat inchoate movement seeking parliamentary reform, accountable government, and the security of a free press.® The number 45 was rapidly taken up as the symbol of this movement. It gradually became a metonymic sign for John Wilkes, for liberty, and for radicalism. This set of associations was made simply enough: the forty-fifth number of the North Briton had been written by Wilkes, and to think of the number 45 was therefore to think of its author as well as the cause that he came to personify. The fact that publication of the North Briton number 45 was the seed from which radicalism grew made "45" a portentous and propitious number: the birth of "45" was the genesis of reform. The symbol, therefore, not only represented reformist politics but acted as a reminder of the circumstances of their inception. At the same time, "45" had other associations. Though the prosecution of the forty-fifth number of the North Briton was largely fortuitous, it was singularly appropriate that an overtly anti-Scottish movement—Wilkes exploited anti-Caledonian feeling with extraordinary ruthlessness*—should have as its symbol a number that recalled the defeat and humiliation of the pretender in 1745. The number 45 possessed several other advantages as a symbol: being a logogram, it was simple to execute and recognizable even to the illiterate. Above all it was a number, an abstract symbol rather than an object with symbolic import, and therefore definitely more flexible in its application or use. The creative possibilities of the number, indeed, were even greater than those of such ideograms as the Christian cross or the more modern peace sign. Apart from its use as a logogram—as a "sign" that could be attached to or drawn upon any object—the number was deployed as a unit of time, of space, and of mass, thereby converting an hour of the day (12:4.5),' a dwelling (45 feet in length),* or an

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object (such as the 45-lb. simnel cake presented to Wilkes),® into a component of Wilkite ritual. When 45 was used as a cardinal number, a comparable transformation occurred: 45 similar events or objects (like the 45 dumplings served at a Wandsworth christening) 10 were automatically Wilkite, just as the ordinal "forty-fifth" had radical associations: pro-Wilkite sermons, for instance, were usually taken from the forty-fifth verse of biblical chapters. 11 Finally, any object that could be broken down into forty-five equal parts also had a radical connotation: such as the special candlestick with 45 branches made for a Newcastle publican in 1770." Although the number 45 does not appear to have had very special associations before the Wilkite agitation, radicals could draw on the very long tradition of number symbolism to treat the number 45 in ways customarily reserved for such sacred, hallowed, or lucky numbers as seven, twenty-seven, or forty-nine. 15 The number 45, therefore, had tremendous potential as a symbol for those who wished to use it. Not that Wilkes's supporters ever displayed much reluctance to demonstrate their allegiance to the number 45. Using provincial newspapers, legal records, and contemporary memoirs and letters, I have gathered data on incidents involving the number 45 from some sixty different provincial localities as far apart as Paisley in Scotland and Saltash in Cornwall, as well as over fifty episodes in London in such diverse quartiers as Islington, Chelsea, Seven Dials, Rotherhithe, Holborn, Clare Market, Southwark, and Westminster. 14 I have not included in my discussion similar occurrences in the North American colonies nor in Ireland, though several took place in both localities.1* Several characteristics of these events stand out. First and foremost, the number 45 was persistently associated with sociable and convivial activities—eating, drinking, and gift giving—which frequently took place as public celebrations and as acts of commemoration. Club meetings, lavish dinners, and extravagant celebrations were jampacked with Wilkite number symbolism. Take clubs: there were numerous societies established with forty-five members. The Minority Club in St. Paul's Churchyard; the "45" Society that met at the 45 Tavern in Gray's Inn Passage and was managed by Mr. Keys, a former cook of Alderman Beckford's; the "Free and Easy under the Rose" in Cursitor Street, and the

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Liberty Beefsteak club, established by the more influential friends of Wilkes after his release from prison in April 1770: they all restricted their membership to the magical number. 16 Similar societies flourished in the provinces. Convivial gatherings of fortyfive members occurred at such clubs as the "Templetonians" of Temple Street in Bristol and at the Patriotic Club in Newbury. Members sang songs to Wilkes and liberty and the number 45, drank toasts to the special number, and replenished their charging glasses from a punch bowl which, as likely as not, bore a radical motto and the inevitable number 45. 17 If clubs were common enough, feasts and dinners arranged on the principle of "45" were even more frequent. It is difficult to convey the complexity and precision as well as the total effect of these events without recourse to contemporary description. Characteristic of these numerous dinners was one held at Poplar in April 1768:18 The company consisted of 45 gentlemen. At 45 minutes past one, there were drank 45 gills of wine, with 45 new laid eggs in them. Precisely at 45 minutes past two a very genteel dinner was served up, being five courses, nine dishes each, which made the number 45. In the middle of the table the figures of 45 were inlaid with mother of pearl, on which was placed a noble sirloin of beef weighing 45 lbs. The tablecloth and plates were marked 45. On the back of every chair these figures were carved, and exactly 25 gilt nails in a chair, which with the 20 on each chair 45.- The whole concluded with a ball in the evening, when 45 ladies entered the room; then the dances immediately began; and each lady was saluted at the end of every dance, which were nine minuets, with nine quadrils, and nine cotillions, and 18 country dances, being in the whole 45. After the ladies had been kissed round that number of times, and 45 couple of jellies were eaten, the company retired with great mirth and festivity, at 45 minutes past three o'clock.

This elaborate entertainment — naturally I have chosen one of the better examples—was uncharacteristic only in two respects. It was held privately, whereas most dinners were staged either in a large tavern or in the open; and second, in what, as we shall see, was an unusual move, the entertainment involved the segmentation of 45 into its divisors—in this case 9 and their multiples— rather than the constant use of the number in its entirety. Feasts of this sort were often only one constituent element of Wilkite popular celebration in its most lavish forms. The Cam-

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bridge Chronicle of June 1768 published the following description, sent in by a reader, of the celebration at King's Lynn that accompanied the news that the writ of outlawry against Wilkes had finally been reversed: 19 There was a general display of colour in our streets, and on board ships in the harbour; the bells were set out, and rung for the greatest part of the day, and in the evening there was a bonfire on the Market Hill; the principal streets were illuminated, and made a very brilliant appearance. Several of the houses were lighted with 45 candles, several windows ornamented with 45 cut out of paper, and stuck on squares; and on one window was cut out in pasteboard Liberty Triumphant, no. 45, which from the lights in the room, had a very pretty effect.

All these celebrations involved veritable numerological orgies at which objects were inscribed with the special "ever memorable" number, or arranged in groups of 45. At dinners beef, ham, veal, pork, pigeons, salmon, turbot, whelks (used because of their punning similarity with Wilkes), oysters, turtle, dumplings, cabbages, potatoes, cucumbers, tarts, cake, and jellies, together with beer, porter, and wine were all served as 45 units—whether by numbers, pounds weight, or pints. 10 Most of these occasions involved either toasts to the number 45 or the drinking of 45 toasts, and frequently the smoking of 45 pipes of tobacco signaled the end of the feast.* 1 At demonstrations crowds wore badges and blue ribbons or favors emblazoned with the number 45, though few went as far as Mr. Scott, the patriotic newscarrier, who was "remarkable for wearing at his breast a silver medal of Mr. Wilkes marked no. 45, as are likewise his sleeve buttons, breastbuckle etc."** T h e hats, coats, and coaches of passersby, especially if they were genteel, were chalked or inscribed by members of the crowd with the special number.* 3 In May 1768, for instance, as a Gentleman was going through the Mob in the Borough (of Southwark), a fellow observing that he had not got the no. 45 on his hat, insisted on his letting him put it on, to which the Gentleman readily agreed, in order to get through the crowd unmolested: He had no sooner got the Hat than he ran off with it, but being pursued and caught by some sailors, he was obliged to return it, and after a severe ducking was commanded to go about his business, with threats, that if he ever was seen among the Friends of Liberty again, they would tye a Stone about his Neck, and throw him into the Middle of the Thames.14

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For the Wilkite crowd, marking the number 45 was a political act, a declaration of liberty; theft was not. Such strokes for liberty help explain why Wilkes's enemies were the victims of marking. Justice Capel, a Surrey magistrate who was especially assiduous in his pursuit of Wilkites, had his coat chalked with the number 45 by John Perceval, a pewterer. When Perceval was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for this "crime," Wilkites "maliciously defaced" the "Front Door and Pilasters" of the justice's home by carving them with the number 45, as a more permanent and enduring reminder of the cause of liberty. ts Marking and labeling were not confined to the crowd nor to occasions of jubilation. Numerous artifacts, many of which survive, were embellished with the radical number. Coins and commemorative medals bore the legend. Many ceramic items including punch bowls, snuffboxes, mugs, and brooches had the number 45 as their motif,*6 as did many of the gifts that admirers presented to Wilkes during his confinement in the King's Bench prison.47 Enterprising tradesmen produced Wilkite products based on the special number. Joseph Leech, a wigmaker of Romsey in Hampshire, advertised "my new-invented Cork Peruke of 45 curls," a sample of which was dispatched to Wilkes along with an excruciating verse praising the patriot's pate and its new covering.*8 A Worcester staymaker presented Polly, Wilkes's much loved daughter, who for a short while became a leader of fashion because of her father, with stays "of 45 pieces or quarters, 45 holes and the no. 45 beautifully marked on the stomacher." M In both these cases the sales of the produce seem to have been as important to their manufacturer as was the cause of Wilkes and liberty, but the ingenuity shown in producing these and many other artifacts provided good publicity both for their producer and for the radical cause. The arrangement of Wilkite activities according to units of time and space based on the number 45 was one means of ordering conduct and regulating behavior at feasts and celebrations. Dinners at Newport, Isle of Wight, Bristol, Reading, Poplar, Alnwick, and Amford in Somerset all began or ended at precisely 45 minutes after or before a particular hour. 80 In Sunderland 45 skyrockets "representing the towering spirit and lustre of true patriotism" were fired off at 45-second intervals to celebrate Wilkes's release from prison; in London a 45-foot-long table was

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laid in the streets to commemorate the same occasion, while in Worcester the attempt of a local bell ringer to peal for 45 minutes led to an affray that produced litigation and a countersuit.®1 Probably the most notable instance of this sort of organization, however, was the assembly room erected, so it was claimed, by 45 patriots of Berkhamstead, and which was built as a square with walls 45 feet long." When did these extraordinary celebrations take place? Most, though not all, were held as acts of political commemoration, designed to impress the public with the importance of certain days sacred to the cause of Wilkes and liberty. Of these, undoubtedly the most important was 18 April, the date on which Wilkes was released from jail in 1770, and therefore the moment at which Wilkes and liberty were reunited. Radical groups throughout the country vied with one another, each trying to out-celebrate their allies in other towns and villages and to create a lasting local memory of one of the finest moments of the Wilkite cause. 15 Thereafter April 18 occupied an important annual place in the Wilkite calendar. Wilkes's birthday, October 28, was of almost equal consequence. Year after year this date was marked by dinners, treating, and numerological celebrations. Brewers sold beer at cut prices, street parties were held in the metropolis, and citizens illuminated their houses, either because they were supporters of the cause or because they feared that the mob would smash unlighted windows.54 The Wilkite calendar also included the different dates of the Middlesex elections, when Wilkes had been returned by the county despite the opposition of the government. February 16 and 28, March 16 and 29, and April 18 were all remembered as the triumphs of the sturdy Middlesex electorate. On each of these occasions the voters had vanquished a venal Parliament and a corrupt adminstration by returning Wilkes to his rightful Commons seat. The jubilation of these days was contrasted with the somber atmosphere of the anniversary of the St. George's Field Massacre, held on May 10. The radical minister, Dr. Free, preached an annual sermon castigating the heinous murder of Wilkites by Scottish troops outside the King's Bench Prison in 1768.55 This solemn commemoration was accompanied by parades of mourners, a visit to the grave of the massacre's most famous victim, William Allen, and by the tolling of muffled church bells. Each of these calendrical events,

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as well as the original incidents that gave rise to their commemoration, contained the full panoply of Wilkite symbolic regalia and were also the times at which the number 45 was most obtrusive. The number also appeared on other, nonradical calendrical occasions such as May Day, Shrove Tuesday, and the annual feast days of such trades as flax dressers and wool breakers. 36 In Bristol in 1769, for example, The 1st of May being annually a season for youths to erect Maypoles, decorated with garlands of flowers &c, one amongst others was set up at Limkiln Dock, Bristol. The pole was just 45 feet high and had 45 garlands on it, with this motto No. 45 Wilkes and Liberty. There was just 45 couples who danced around it, and drank 45 quarts of ale. —Just opposite the above pole was hung up the effigy of L B , with a Scotch bonnet, white cockade and jack boots, which after a little season the enraged spectators cut down, quartered, and scattered over the face of the earth —The pole was raised 45 minutes after eight o'clock in the morning, and there was drunk 45 drams. —The children who ran about the streets playing at Thread the Needle, sung to their companions, Open the gate as high as the sky, to let FREE Wilkes, and I go b y . "

This means of giving political import to a traditional popular festival paralleled the transformation of rites de passage into Wilkite occasions. Christenings—including one of a dog—weddings, and funerals were provided with a Wilkite connotation by the employment of the number 45. M In August 1768 a Rotherhithe gentleman "left 10s for every poor Widow in the parish, and 45 pots of beer for each hardworking man." At his funeral there were 45 old women, 45 young maids, and 45 bachelors, each of whom was given 10d., a peck load, and eight pounds of bacon. 39 If most of this remarkable data is to be believed, then in the course of a few years the number 45 had become a ubiquitous and immediately recognizable political symbol, as much a part of the political vocabulary as the shibboleths of "liberty" and the "constitution." Just as the Hollywood "Roman" haircut has become a conventional indication or sign that a Him or play is set in classical Rome, so the number 45 prompted recognition of the Wilkite context of any object or event. 40 What exactly are we to make of the rich ethnographic information about the number 45? Can we raise its significance above that of the entertaining anecdote and trivial story? How was the

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number 45 used, and what did it mean? Indeed, how credible are the accounts of incidents involving the so-called Cabalistic number?" It is difficult to envisage dinners and demonstrations of such precision and orderliness, especially when 45 gallons of ale were provided or 45 toasts drunk. The number itself is a large one: almost half a hundred; it is the equivalent of a full American football squad or three rugby teams. Groups of this size are not easy to control even today, and it is doubtful that a Hanoverian Englishman had a stronger internalized sense of discipline than does his modern counterpart. Such stories as the tale of the Irish chairman who wagered 45 shillings that he could drink 45 gills of wine in 45 minutes and who, having won his wager, fell into a deep sleep for 45 minutes excite the incredulity of even the most gullible reader. 4 * Occasionally it is possible to corroborate some of the instances of the number 45; several of the gifts so marked are recorded both in the newspapers and in Wilkes's correspondence, Wilkite artifacts decorated with the number 45 still survive, and court proceedings enable us to check other reports of the way in which the crowd employed the number. 4 5 But the bulk of my evidence comes from newspaper reports, many of which cannot be substantiated by other evidence. T h e more orderly the occasion, of course, the less likely we are to have court material on the incident. All too often, the authors of memoirs seem to have relied on newspapers rather than on personal experience or recollection for their descriptions of Wilkite events. This seems to present a major evidential problem. Eighteenthcentury newspapers were, as both contemporaries and historians have noted, notoriously unreliable and inaccurate. Even the press itself recognized this: Lloyd's Evening Post and St. James's Chronicle both carried sections headed Lyars Corners in which they reprinted mendacious extracts from the papers of their rivals. This does not, however, invalidate the use of newspapers as the chief source of material for Wilkite symbolism. We should not automatically assume that accounts of Wilkite incidents were examples of factual reporting; certainly this would not have been the expectation of most eighteenth-century readers of the press. Newspapers were less purveyors of information that had been screened and tested for its veracity than a forum for accounts provided by readers and correspondents. A free press was one open

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to all, and a newspaper proprietor who declined to publish news items submitted by readers was likely to be castigated for an invasion of the liberty of the press. 44 Participants and observers sent in most of the descriptions of "45" festivities and dinners because they believed it the public duty of a newspaper to record these events. Such correspondents were fully aware of the value of such publicity—there were bitter complaints if journals omitted local celebrations and dinners 45 —and their accounts would doubtless err on the side of exaggeration. In consequence, there were sometimes disputes over the character and significance of an event. The Newcastle Journal, for example, contained an acrimonious exchange about the celebrations held at Morpeth of Wilkes's release from prison. An antiWilkite contributed a mealymouthed account of the occasion, deprecating the participants; he was promptly refuted by a radical correspondent. 46 It has to be conceded, therefore, that the most vivid and detailed descriptions of the number 45 were accounts written, parti pris, by Wilkites; they almost certainly exaggerated certain features of radical ceremonial and idealized the event. Paradoxically, however, this makes them more, rather than less, valuable as historical evidence. The way in which the accounts were written—what they emphasize and what they omit—is an important indication of what Wilkites themselves wished to stress and what they wanted to portray to the public. If Wilkite ritual and symbol is myth, then it is Wilkite myth, not the idealization of some "disinterested" reporter, and therefore extremely useful to us in understanding what number 45 meant and represented to those who used it with such creativity. Symbols, of course, have many, sometimes ambiguous and even contradictory meanings, and the number 45 was no exception. Despite its orderly and regular numerical associations, it was also considered to be an important talisman or lucky number. Whether deliberately invoked or observed to be present coincidentally, its presence was seen as bringing good fortune. There were numerous reports of lotteries, raffles, and elections which explicitly linked the number 45 and an auspicious event. A Bristol clock raffle was won by the forty-fifth ticket, the clerk of the Durham turnpike and a Gravesend churchwarden were elected by 45 votes; the forty-fifth lottery ticket in 1768 won £1,000 and

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THE NUMBER

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when another number 45 gained a similar though smaller prize, the event was construed as a favorable augury for Wilkes. Gamblers, a notoriously superstitious class, switched their betting habits to accommodate or include the number. 4 7 The very frequent association of the number 45 with fortune and contingency, and its connection with the fragile and evanescent—the skyrocket, the spluttering candle, the toasting glass, confections designed for human consumption—suggest (and clearly I am speculating here) an acceptance of the transitory nature of the Wilkite phenomenon. It was as if Wilkes's followers recognized the peculiar circumstances that had led to his meteoric rise as a patriot hero, and knew that the wheel of fortune could easily and would probably turn to eclipse Wilkes and, by inference, what he stood for. By linking the fortunes of Wilkes and the Wilkites with those of the number 45, political commentators were able to use it as an allegorical means of commenting on the fate of radical politics. The story of the Darlington clock that repeatedly struck 45 times during the Middlesex election, but which stopped totally when Wilkes became a London alderman, was clearly a metaphorical means of expressing the feat that Wilkes had sold out politically. 48 This type of report has a long history. During the Walpolean and Pclhamite eras, opposition papers such as the London Evening Post had used such devices as allegory, metaphor, and metonymy to convey their political attitudes, to provide sufficient concealment to hinder prosecution, to ridicule their opponents, and to entertain their audience. Humorous items on cockfights involving a bird called Wilkes, and numerological anecdotes about the eyes, arms, and legs of Wilkes's supporters were a part of this tradition. 49 They resembled the so-called Intelligence Extraordinary sections of earlier newspapers, which had attacked the 1753 Jew Bill with extravagant tales of national circumcision and mocked the Scots as scabious and ill tutored in the English tongue. 60 The number 45, therefore, had not only a lucky but a humorous and playful aspect. Many of the coincidences mentioned— that Charles I was England's forty-fifth king; that Middlesex, according to Kitchen's map, was England's forty-fifth county 51 — were designed to amuse and entertain. Joke books such as Wilkes'sJests provided readers with "Bon Mots, Puns, Repartees,

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and other Witticisms, respecting/oAn Wilkes, Esq; and the ever memorable Number Forty Five," by collecting the best anecdotes and tales from the newspapers and journals. 5 * It was felt that the virtue and lightness of the Wilkite cause naturally generated good humor and high spirits. How could Wilkites not be joyous when celebrating the sacred cause of freedom and liberty? The oppressed, those who lived in tyrannical regimes or breathed the corrupt air of courts, were naturally devious, shifty, and sullen; Wilkites, au contraire, were bold, hale and hearty, ready and willing to laugh and enjoy their freedom. The creation of such a cheerful, jovial atmosphere was almost a political statement in its own right. This spirit pervaded Wilkite humor and celebration. William Penrice, the turnkey of the King's Bench prison, described the antics of the crowds that came to view Wilkes at his prison window as "humorous, montebank performances," "diversions and amusements. . .their fun as they termed i t . " " There was a festive, holidaylike atmosphere at Wilkite celebrations—a feeling of good humor that was reinforced by the puns and plays on the special Wilkite number. To some extent, therefore, the number 45 was a constituent element in a festive and celebratory order which, as I have argued elsewhere, 54 resembled the misrule and license characteristic of such traditional holidays as May Day and Shrove Tuesday—occasions which, even though they contained disorder, license, and the violation of many social proprieties, were nevertheless affirmatory of the existing social order. Ridicule and tomfoolery, the inversion of the roles of ruler and ruled (as in the British army Christmas when officers serve the men) were tolerated occasions. Were Wilkite celebrations involving the number 45 any different? 55 Few questions are more intractable or difficult to answer. It seems reasonably certain that many of the participants in Wilkite crowds regarded Wilkite celebrations as yet another occasion to enjoy themselves, poke fun at their superiors, and to eat, drink, and be merry. Some magistrates, as well as Penrice, the King's Bench turnkey, treated this ebullient conduct as little more than horseplay and, in consequence, adopted a tolerant attitude toward the crowd's conduct. Justice Capel, in contrast, was severely criticized for failing to humor the crowd, and for overreacting when his cape was chalked with the number 45. 56 Other,

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more congenial magistrates had entered into the spirit of the occasion by allowing demonstrators to mark them. But we should beware of taking the number 45 too lightly. Though some "45" celebrations assumed a form similar to those of traditional holidays and calendrical festivities, they had a distinctive meaning for many of the participants. Above all, the dinners with 45 guests and the celebrations with 45 candles were more often than not commemorating or celebrating neither a traditional religious holiday nor an official public event. They were the feasts and bacchanalia of a group explicitly opposed to the government and whose leaders sought structural political reform. The rituals and the symbols of the radicals were not only a way of demonstrating the extent and enthusiasm of their support and of suborning others into apparently radical acts but were also — and this is crucial—a coherent and symbolic expression of what they regarded as the true political order. When we examine the structure of Wilkite events, we can observe a common pattern or matrix, an enacted scheme of political belief that explicitly defines the moral universe of radical politics. The cornerstone of this radical fabric was the number 45. If we are to understand this order and not be overwhelmed by the extravagance of my claim, we first have to make a brief but important excursus into the symbolism and rituals of authority, for it was these that the radicals sought to transmute and, ultimately, to replace. Historians have paid far too little attention to the way in which the Hanoverian political calendar was used by the government and local magistrates to inculcate loyal values in the populace and to encourage the growth of a national political consensus. The anniversaries of events deemed to have been of national importance were celebrated in most county and market towns and were official public holidays, when the chief offices of government were closed.57 Such occasions were recorded in nearly every almanac of the period, and they were frequently not distinguished from the older religious and pagan holidays such as May Day and Twelfth Night. The political calendar included both fixed and movable feasts. Its main dates included the current monarch's birthday (May 28, October 30, and June 4 in the case of the first three Georges) and the dates of their accession and coronation, together with the birthdays of their most important children and relatives. January

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30—a fast-day observed in memory of the execution of Charles I —began the fixed annual calendar. In Newcastle, on that day in 1768, "being the anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles I, the same was strictly observed here; the magistrates went in form to church; the bells were muzzled, and great solemnity observed."58 May 29, however, was an altogether more festive occasion: as Charles II's birthday and the date of the Restoration it was celebrated by the wearing of a sprig of oak on "Oak Apple Day."59 August 1, the anniversary of the Hanoverian succession, was a comparable holiday that coincided with the traditional Lammastide. There were First of August societies that met to toast and fete the Hanoverian monarchy, and other clubs of a political complexion such as the Bristol Union Club also held their annual feasts on this day. 60 Between August and November there was a lull in the political calendar. The period traditionally devoted to gathering in the harvest was not punctuated by any official political festivals. November, however, was an active month. November 4 was celebrated as William Ill's birthday and the anniversary of his landing at Torbay. Even before the nationwide junketings in 1788, which celebrated the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, there were revolution societies that forgathered to hail England's delivery from popery and tyrannical power. 61 This, of course, was also the official reason for the holiday on the following day, November 5: it was intended to recall the happy escape of James I and his subjects from the heinous acts of Guido Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot." The final event in the political calendar was Queen Elizabeth's Day, which was celebrated—with admittedly diminishing frequency—on November 17. In the early eighteenth century these political holidays were the occasion of considerable political violence. In 1715 warring factions of Jacobite apprentices and Hanoverian bullyboys, sponsored by the leading Whigs, fought in the streets of London and several deaths ensued.6® Each side tried to celebrate its own holidays with special extravagance and to obstruct its rivals' efforts at commemoration. The calendar, like the nation, was divided between Hanoverian and Jacobite. However, by mid-century and with the triumph of Whig oligarchy, a more sedate, consensual calendar had emerged. Though Whig-Republicans still blasphemed January 30 by holding calves-head feasts and raising

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their glasses to "Old Noll" while the rest of the nation held their contrite fast, and though Jacobite drinking clubs persisted, most men, of whatever political persuasion, observed the official political holidays. The mid-Hanoverian calendar was a skilled amalgam of loyalism (January 30, May 29, November 5) and Whiggery (August 1, November 4); typifying the development of Whig politics in the period, it stressed allegiance to the Hanoverian regime, played down rights of resistance, and sought to circumscribe a Whig consensus. These holidays, it is important to stress, were seen as didactic events and educational spectacles. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer contained special services for January SO, May 29, and November 5 that were intended to remind the public of their civic duties and to warn against disobedience, turbulence, and social presumption. As Youth's Entertaining and Instructive Calendar remarked of January 30, "Very justly, therefore, ought we annually to observe this day with the sincerest Sorrow and Contrition; since the murder of that Pious Prince is a Blot of so deep a Day in our English Annals, that the Tears of a whole Nation will never be able to wash it out."' 4 It is not surprising that January 30 sermons have proved such a valuable source for historians who have sought to trace the continuance of ideas of passive obedience and nonresistance into the eighteenth century. Not that attempts to enjoin loyalty and ardent patriotism were confined to January 30 and May 29. The duke of Northumberland had the Prince of Wales' birthday celebrated at Alnwick by collecting together local children b o m in the same year as the young prince. They were then examined on their catechism; the most proficient and, no doubt, the most precocious youth was rewarded with a crowned garland. The celebration concluded "with such innocent rejoicings as may strongly impress their little minds, and inspire them with sentiments of loyalty, as it were, from the very cradle." As the duke's agent remarked, "did all the nobility as strongly interest themselves in inspiring proper sentiments among their dependents as our good Duke and Duchess, we would see a very different spirit prevail amongst the lower orders, from what we do at present." 65 Such events often involved vivid and dramatic spectacles designed to remind even the humblest members of society of the political order to which they belonged. The importance of politi-

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cal holidays and celebrations lay in their ability to transmit the great political heritage that was seen as both highly desirable and peculiarly English to all members of the community, even the illiterate. The annual jolting of the British collective political memory was therefore a vital task: an appreciation of the liberties and freedoms of the Hanoverian regime was doubly enforced by the celebration of those crucial historical moments that marked the triumph of freedom over liberty and of loyalty and good order over radical enthusiasm and political excess.'* If this inheritance was to be transmitted to posterity and preserved from further attack, then the political calendar had to flourish. Participants were almost obliged to manifest their zeal with conspicuous and public enthusiasm, for this ensured a safe national political heritage. Thus, many feared that the gradual decline in political spectacle heralded a lack of concern with the body politic and a decline in patriotism.67 Commemoration was an intrinsic part of political consciousness, hence Wilkes's annoyance when he visited the jetty where William III landed: "I was much provoked to find no pyramid, no obelisk, nor the least public memorial on such a spot."" The official political calendar, was, of course, as much concerned with the present as with the past. Many of the political anniversaries had, in a Durkheimian sense, a "sacred" quality about them. They were special occasions set aside to create a symbolic and dramatic representation of the social order and its cardinal values, as construed by the leaders of the nation. The calendrical rituals were intended both to reinforce the social role of individuals and the unity of the society as a whole.69 This is why many gentlemen, magistrates, and aristocrats sponsored and encouraged such events. They believed in the efficacy of such ceremonies, and were, on the whole, confident that they encouraged unanimity and social bonding. Admittedly, during the course of the eighteenth century, these occasions, like the more raucous traditional holidays, came under attack for their encouragement of drunkenness, sexual license, indolence, and social disorder.70 But the political calendar was not abolished: it was tamed; its retention was deemed necessary as a means of securing loyalty and holding society together. Moreover, it was felt that anniversaries bound men to one another in a particular way. The official political calendar was

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characterized by acts of largess, charity, and munificencedonating money, freeing debtors, providing food and drink— that helped to distinguish rich and poor even at the moment in which they were united. 71 The celebration demonstrated who the public's leaders and benefactors were, who held the whip hand, and just how magnanimous they could be. As many radicals complained, it was an essentially conservative force. Jean Paul Marat, an ardent Wilkite in his English days, singled out the calendar and public entertainments as one of the links in the "chain of slavery" with which the government sought to bind the British people. Such junketings, he and others complained, induced the people to "lose sight of liberty" and of their "independency."7* Ministers and radicals, therefore, shared the belief that the calendar inculcated obedience, even when they differed violently over the desirability of such festivals. Because these occasions were generally regarded as symbolic and symptomatic of the political order, and because they involved an intensification and a compression of political feeling, they were both highly important and very dangerous to those in authority. We have already seen how the political divisions between Hanoverian and Jacobite manifested themselves with particular vehemence on calendrical holidays.7* The existence of the anniversaries served to exacerbate rather than alleviate political tensions and exaggerate rather than heal political divisions. On the other hand, a lukewarm and desultory celebration was also threatening, because it indicated a dissatisfied populace. As one of the correspondents in the North Briton remarked:74 The custom of celebrating public anniversaries, I have always considered as a wise institution. Besides keeping up the memory of great events, it is one of the surest and most fallible methods of discovering the present humour and disposition of the people. If the people are in a good humour, they will naturally express it by those signs which custom has prescribed, or their own fantasy may suggest. If they are in a bad humour, they will either betray it by a sullen reserve, or such marks as are still less equivocal. Thus one of the ways in which the government and local magistrates responded to the Wilkite threat was to increase the visibility of loyalist jubilation. It was remarked that in 1768 the royal

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birthday was celebrated more lavishly and more publicly than at any time during the previous twenty years.' 5 We are now in a better position to understand the meaning of Wilkite ritual and celebration. The Wilkite symbolic order, of which the number 45 was such an important part, was deliberately and self-consciously opposed to the ritual and spectacle of government. Thus, the Wilkites established their own political calendar to compete with the annual loyalist celebrations. This alternative focus of political expression was naturally very alarming: the more successful, the more ebullient and joyous the Wilkite dinners and demonstrations, the stronger political dissent and public dissatisfaction with government seemed and was seen to be. The ministry and local magistrates therefore sought to limit and constrain radical pageantry. They tried to forbid illuminations, they locked the belfries of churches to prevent bell ringing, and they stepped up street policing.7* The threat posed by the Wilkite calendar was not simply one of public disorder and of the dislocation caused by an increase in the annual number of commemorative holidays; it was what these new celebrations said about the polity that was so alarming. The number 45 played a central role in the creation of this Wilkite symbolic statement. It distinguished political friend from foe, defined Wilkite space, and ordered Wilkite time. This "party Mark," 77 as the striking sailors of 1768 called it, was, as I have shown elsewhere, both a symbol of solidarity and identity and a means of symbolic appropriation. 7 ' The marking of individuals, of a coach or dwelling brought the person or piece of property within the Wilkite realm. This was regarded as no light matter. In 1768 two naval officers fought a duel after one of them had tried to force the other, a Scot, to accept a small cake of the type sold by street sellers which was marked "Wilkes and Liberty & no. 45." 79 Territory was also appropriated: Wilkites mapped out their processional routes by marking the way with the number 45, and created radical space by measuring it in 45 units.*0 Displaying the number 45 conferred rights of access to this Wilkite realm upon its bearer. In March 1768 the crowd would not let men pass by Hyde Park on their way to the election at Brentford unless they sported the patriotic number.* 1 In Southwark two months later the same principle was applied to those passing

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near the King's Bench prison, whether they were rich or poor.8* Similarly, only those wearing a badge with the special number were admitted to a West Country tradesman's dinner held to celebrate Wilkes's release.88 Entry and exit into Wilkite "sacred" time were similarly defined. Events began or finished (or both) at 45 minutes before or after the hour, the number 45 signaling the qualitative transitions that took place. 84 The number 45, in other words, conferred order on Wilkite activity. It drew on the time-honored and traditional association of number with precision, with order, and with harmony. 85 Because it entailed the use of a number, Wilkite ceremony required extraordinary exactitude; as the gentlemen who arranged the dinner at Poplar remarked, it prevented men from being at "sixes and sevens."86 Such mathematical discipline, such standardization, was not seen by most eighteenth-century Englishmen as intrinsically desirable. Indeed, the introduction of regimental numbers on the buttons of British soldiers had been greeted with considerable hostility: officers resented being numbered "like hackney carriages" and were publicly ridiculed for their new uniforms. 87 But Wilkite precision, discipline, and numerological order were self-imposed; their adoption was an act of choice, not one that had been forced upon the radicals by any outside body. Self-control, the demonstration of one's autonomy or independence, was indicative of the Wilkites' capacity to choose for themselves, of their power to be free. Paradoxically, the restraint and order of Wilkite ceremonial was symptomatic of the liberty that its participants enjoyed. Of course, as we have seen, not all Wilkite celebrations conformed to these exacting standards and ideals. There were bitter complaints from the Wilkites themselves about the disorder of the crowd and about its coercive and bullying tactics. Before the Middlesex elections the radicals distributed "cards of caution," urging sober conduct on their supporters, and before Wilkes's release from prison in April 1770 there were several newspaper letters from Wilkites advocating restraint. 88 As one correspondent wrote: 89 The friends of Mr. Wilkes are very desirous of being distinguished from his enemies, which wish of theirs, compelling everybody to put out lights, will entirely destroy. If we wish to be free ourselves, let us grant liberty to others. Let us cease to complain of tyranny, if we ourselves are

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tyrants. Liberty and property are too sacred to be sported with, and therefore compelling people to act contrary to their inclinations, must be considered an act of cruelty and injustice. This attitude was epitomized by a Wilkite from Newcastle who remarked that, "every true friend to the glorious cause, was sensible that decency and harmony could alone contribute towards its support, and the establishment of freedom." 9 0 Self-imposed decorum, not coercive disorder, characterized the ideal Wilkite demonstration. Liberty was not license, the opportunity to act without restraint, but punctilious self-regulation. Wilkites not only gained liberty through the pursuit of number 45 but also obtained equality. The internal structure and ordering of Wilkite events clearly created an egalitarian order. When the number 45 was employed as a cardinal number, the objects that comprised the number 45 were almost invariably the same— 45 loaves or 45 dishes—and it was almost unheard of to divide 45 into its denominators—nine fives, three fifteens—or to make up a total of 45 from different objects. Again, Wilkite artifacts consisted of 45 equal constituent elements: a wig with 45 curls, a barrel with 45 staves. And the units of measurement that feature so often in celebrations—units of mass (pounds), of space (feet), and of time (minutes) have, of course, to be standard and uniform. Each unit or object based on the number 45 usually bore a one-to-one correspondence, an equal relationship, with the other units and objects so designated. Forty-five guests drank 45 toasts, consumed 45 pints of beer, 45 pounds of beef, and so on. Each of the 45 men participated equally in the event; each had available to him the same amount of food and drink (at one Brentford dinner the beef was divided "in equal portions by compasses"). 91 The entire symbolic order stressed the compatibility, the correspondence, the symmetry, and the equality of the occasion. The number 45 standardizes and makes uniform; precision of measurement is the guarantee of equality. Liberty and equality are united by the magical number. Naturally, not all Wilkite celebrations were as precisely egalitarian. Some of the demonstrations involved the sort of munificence and treating that reinforced a hierarchical social order. 91 But in reports of Wilkite events this aspect of jubilation was often omitted or played down. The horizontal social bonds uniting men

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who participated equally received far greater emphasis than the traditional vertical ties that bound rich and poor. Wilkite ceremony, therefore, was an expression of freedom and equality; it was also an event that emphasized that those states could be achieved by precision, careful measurement, standardization, and the coordination of human activity. Some degree of order is, of course, essential to the staging of a major event involving at least 45 participants, but the exactitude of the Wilkites was truly obsessive. In fact, it is strongly redolent of those characteristics usually associated with what I shall call, for want of a better term, a bourgeois mentality. The features of Wilkite ceremony are also those of the market and modern industry. Let me repeat them: precision, careful measurement, standardization, and the coordination of human activity. Some radicals, like Robert Morris, the secretary of the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights, were eager advocates of a reform that would have produced standardized weights and measures.' 3 Indeed, there is some evidence to show that Wilkites drawn from the middle ranks of society— and these men formed the hard core of the movement and were Wilkes's chief financial backers—were advocates of such values. They sought an economic and social order that was governed by the exact science and abstract, logical rules of political economy and the market rather than by personal, patrician discretion; in addition they wanted a penal system, modeled on the ideas of Beccaria, which would have ended judicial discretion and replaced it by fixed, finely graded, and constantly enforced pains and penalties. 94 The Wilkite use of number tended, therefore, not to look back to the traditions of medieval and renaissance numerology (despite number 45's value as a lucky number), but rather forward to the countinghouse, the shop, and the burgeoning world of commerce. Let us take stock of the argument. I have tried to demonstrate that both Wilkite radicals and the Hanoverian government employed highly elaborate and symbolically sophisticated ceremonies and rituals as a means both of giving public expression to their political ideals and of attempting to ensure their reaffirmation and future security. In other words, all sides—not simply a fringe group of dissidents—saw such symbolic forms as a necessary and vital part of politics. Moreover, the deployment of these commemorations and the arrangement of these rituals were also

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seen as a means of exercising power and authority over eighteenth-century Englishmen. As Edward Thompson and Douglas Hay have both recently reminded us, the coercive physical strength, the brute force of the Hanoverian state was severely limited and circumscribed; legitimacy was at a premium. 9 5 The capacity to hold men's hearts and minds did and still does confer authority on those who have that power. Symbolic expressions of the political order therefore turn out to be far more instrumental than they appear at first sight. Indeed, the more closely one examines such events, the harder it is to distinguish instrumental and symbolic acts. I am not, of course, claiming that the official political calendar was the sole means of integrating citizens into the Hanoverian state, nor am I arguing that the existence of such a calendar is presumptive evidence of successful "value integration" in the society as a whole. This would be as naive as to claim that the successful establishment of Wilkite ceremonial would have ensured the triumph of the radicals. It is easy to be carried away by a (very useful and illuminating) functionalist or neo-Durkheimian analysis of these occasions and to place more weight on them than they actually deserve. 96 Clearly, there were many other ways in which the Hanoverian government sought to unite political society, and other means by which the radicals tried to gain and establish power and influence. But the essential point is that, regardless of how effective such symbolic expression actually was, eighteenthcentury Britons believed the functionalist argument and accepted the efficacy of political ritual. Commemoration and the symbols of politics were accepted as an important means of political expression and as a significant political forum: they were built into the eighteenth-century Englishman's understanding of the contentious business of politics. As such, Hanoverian political symbolism is important to the political historian, not only as a means of elucidating the nature of authority and politics but as a means by which competing political ideals can be elucidated. The different structures of ceremony and celebration help reveal the mentalité, the presuppositions and attitudes of the participants. Again, political iconography is not the sole means by which such ideals can be recovered, but it is an important and useful one. The number 45, when placed in context, unveils a complex and, at times, ambiguous

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political order. Yet, in the final analysis, it shows the extent to which the Wilkites were beginning to equate liberty and equality and reveals how far they were moving away from the traditional assumptions of the Hanoverian polity. NOTES 1. George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (London, 1970). 2. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, 2 vols. (London, 1956-1960); The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967); "Political Man," Man Versus Society in 18th Century Britain (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 1-21; Lucy Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768-1774: A Study in the Rise of Metropolitan Radicalism (Creighton Lecture, London, 1959); "The City of London and the Devonshire-Pitt Administration 1756-7," Proceedings of the British Academy XLVI (1960), 147-187; Nicolas Rogers, "Aristocratic Clientage, Trade and Independency: Popular Politics in Pre-radical Westminster," Past and Present 61 (1973), 70-106; Paul Langford, "William Pitt and Public Opinion, 1757," English Historical Review CCXLVI (1973), The Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975). 3. See John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 39-40. 4. George Nobbe, The North Briton: A Study in Political Propaganda (New York. 1939), pp. 130-140, 202-224. 5. A good general survey is to be found in Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760-1785 (London, 1962). 6. Brewer, "The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion," Historical Journal XVI, 1 (1973), 20-22. 7. For the hour of day see Pope's Bath Chronicle, 7 April 1768; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 11 June 1768; Farley's BristolJournal, 14 April 1770; Western Flying Post, 6 May, 11 December 1769; Worcester Journal, 14 June 1770. 8. Salisbury Journal, 8 January 1770. 9. Worcester Journal, 9 March 1769. 10. Middlesex Journal, 25 April 1769. 11. Worcester Journal, 26 May, 2 June, 4 August 1768, 12 January 1769. E.g., Genesis 18:28, "And He said if I find there Forty and Five I will not destroy it (Sodom)"; Psalm 119:45, "I will walk at Liberty." 12. John Sykes, Local Records; or, Historical Register of Remarkable Events which have occurred in Northumberland and Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, from the earliest period

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of authentic record to the present Times, 2 vols. (Newcastle, 1833), I, 271 seq.; Newcastle Journal, 7 April 1770. 13. Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism (London, 1970), pp. 3, 14. 14. See my map of Wilkite incidents in Brewer, Party Ideology, p. 175. 15. E.g., Middlesex Journal, 2 November 1769; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York, 1972), pp. 170, 193, 205; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 25 June, 29 October 1768; Newcastle Journal, 28 April 1770; Thomas Gage to Barrington, 21 February 1770, Barrington Papers, HA 174/1026/6c, East Suffolk Record Office. 16. John Amies to John Wilkes, 30 June 1764, B[ritish] L[ibrary] Add. MSS 30868 f.89; Wilkes's Diary, 25 April 1770, B.L. Add. MSS 30866; Middlesex Journal, 20 April, 10 June, 26, 30 August, 9 September, 26 October 1769; Cambridge Chronicle, 14 April 1770. 17. Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 8 July 1768; Leeds Mercury, 7 February 1769. For such artifacts see John Brewer, "Commercialisation and Politics" in J. Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: Commercialisation in Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming). 18. Newcastle Journal, 30 April 1768. 19. Cambridge Chronicle, 18 June 1768. 20. General Evening Post, 17 April 1770; Middlesex Journal, 25 April, 4 May, 18 May 1769; Pope's Bath Chronicle, 7, 21 April, 21 May 1768; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 14 April 1770; Bristol Journal, 24 June 1769; Cambridge Chronicle, 5 November 1769; Gloucester Journal, 16, 23 April 1770; Newcastle Chronicle, 2 December 1769, 21 April 1770; Newcastle Courant, 11 January 1766; Newcastle Journal, 30 April 1768, 17 March, 21 April 1770; Western Flying Post, 6 November, 11 December 1769, 16 April 1770; Worcester Journal, 21 July 1768. 21. Oxford Magazine (1768), p. 163; Middlesex Journal, 20 July 1769; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 30 July 1768; Bristol Journal, 21 April 1770; SalisburyJournal, 8January 1770; WorcesterJournal 5 May 1768, 17 May 1770. 22. Middlesex Journal, 13 May 1769; Norwich Mercury, 11 November 1769; Worcester Journal, 6 April, 16 November 1769. 23. Felix Farley's BristolJournal, 14 May 1768; WorcesterJournal, 19 May, 13 October 1768, 20 April 1769; Gloucester Journal, 16 April 1770. 24. Worcester Journal, 19 May 1768. 25. London Gazette, 2 December 1768, Middlesex Journal, 3 October 1769; Worcester Journal, 21 July, 18 August, 1 September 1768. 26. For all these artifacts see n. 17. 27. Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 176-178. 28. Salisbury Journal, 8 January 1770. 29. Worcester Journal, 8 December 1768. 30. See n. 7.

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31. Newcastle Journal, 21 April 1770; Worcester Journal, 14 June 1768, 16 March 1769; 19 April 1770; Recognisances for Benjamin Ward and Thomas Sabine, Worcestershire Quarter Sessions, Midsummer 1768. Worcester C.R.O. 32. Salisbury Journal, 8 January 1770. 33. Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 178-179. 34. Cambridge Chronicle, 1 November 1768; Western Flying Post, 7 November 1768, 6 November 1769; Worcester Journal, 2 November 1769. 35. John Free, England's Warning Piece (London, 1769), passim; W. Rendle, The Inns of Old Southwark (London, 1888), p. 348. 36. Newcastle Journal, 17 March 1770; Western Flying Post, 14 May 1770. 37. Western Flying Post, 6 May 1769. 38. Note in KB.1.18.ii, Public Record Office; Middlesex Journal, 25 April, 13 May 1769; Worcester Journal, 21 July, 4 August 1768. 39. Worcester Journal, 4 August 1768. 40. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Anette Lavers (London, 1973), pp. 26-27. 41. Gloucester Journal, 23 April 1770. 42. Newcastle Journal, 16 July 1768. 43. Thomas Greaves to Wilkes, 5 July 1768, B.L. Add. MSS 30870 f. 56; Wilkes to Polly (Wilkes), 8 August 1768, Add. MSS 30879 f. 128; Worcester Quarter Sessions, Midsummer 1768, recognisances for Benjamin Ward and Thomas Sabine. 44. For these assumptions see Steve Botein, " 'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: Business and Political Strategies of the Colonial American Printers," Perspectives in American History IX (1975), 127-225. 45. Newcastle Journal, 28 March 1770. 46. Newcastle Journal, 28 March 1770. 47. For this paragraph see Wilkes's Jest Book; or the Merry Patriot (London, 1770), p. 9; Pope's Bath Chronicle, 4 February 1768; Felix Farley's Bristoljournal, 11 June 1768; Gloucester Journal, 30 November 1771; Newcastle Journal, 17 December 1763, 16 January, 19 March 1763; Worcester Journal, 21 January, 13 February, 21 April 1768, 6 April 1769. 48. Newcastle Courant, 14 January 1769. Cf. Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 16 April 1768; Gloucester Journal, 24 September 1770, 30 November 1771; Worcester Journal, 26 May 1768. 49. Worcester Journal, 15 February, 5 May 1768; Western Flying Post, 13 March 1769. 50. Cranfield, "The London Evening Post and the Jew Bill of 1753," Historical Journal VIII (1965), 16-30; Brewer, "The Misfortunes of Lord Bute," Historical Journal XVI (1973), 21-22. 51. Western Flying Post, 4 April 1768; Worcester Journal, 10 August 1769. Cf. Middlesex Journal, 21 October 1769; Gloucester Journal, 23

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April 1770; Worcester Journal, 16 June 1768; King ag. McLane, B.L. Add. MSS 30884 f. 74. 52. See the advertisement of Wilkes's Jests, appearing, inter alia, in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 20 January 1770; Newcastle Journal, 21 April 1770. 53. The Extraordinary Case of Wm. Penrice late Deputy Marshall or Upper Turnkey of the King's Bench Prison (London, 1768), p. 24. 54. Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 190-191. 55. Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973), chaps. 2, 4, 5. 56. Worcester Journal, 18 August 1768. 57. See the following notes and Brewer, "Commercialisation and Politics," in Brewer, McKendrick and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society. 58. Newcastle Journal, 6 February 1768. 59. Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North-East 1700-1750 (London, 1952), p. 20; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 4 May 1768. 60. P. T. Underdown, "The Parliamentary History of the City of Bristol, 1750-1790," (M.A. thesis, Bristol University, 1948), p. 8; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 30 July 1768. 61. Wilkes Diary, 6 November 1770, B.L. Add. MSS 30866; Protestant Packet VIII (10 November 1780); Newcastle Journal. 9 November 1777. 62. Farley's Bristol Journal, 7 November 1772; Gloucester Journal, 16 November 1772. 63. I am grateful to Nick Rogers for showing me his unpublished paper, "Popular Protests in Early Hanoverian England," which is undoubtedly the best account of these incidents. 64. Youth's Entertaining and Instructive Calendar for the Jubilee Year (London, 1750). 65. Percy to Northumberland, 22 August 1768, Alnwick Castle, Northumberland MSS vol. 43/108. 66. A Complete Collection of all the papers which have appeared from the different parties in the present contest for Members for the County of Northumberland (Newcastle, 1774), pp. 73-78; Thicknesse to Wilkes (July 1769?), B.L. Add. MSS 30870 f. 92; Foley Scrapbook, vol. 3, Worcestershire R.O., 85. 67. E.g., Northampton Mercury, 12 November 1733. 68. Wilkes to Polly Wilkes, 14 August 1772, B.L. Add. MSS 30879 f. 194. 69. See Steven Lukes, "Political Ritual and Social Integration, in his Essays in Social Theory (London, 1977), pp. 55-62. 70. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, chaps. 6, 7. 71. Newcastle Journal, 23 January 1768; Worcester Journal, 4 August 1768; Northampton Mercury, 9 August 1731, 16 October, 6,13 November 1732; Gloucester Journal, 29 July 1771.

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72. [J. P. Marat], The Chains of Slavery: A Work wherein the clandestine and villanous attempts of Princes to ruin liberty are pointed out (London, 1774), p. 32; Hampshire Chronicle, 6 June 1774; Pope's Bath Chronicle, 18 February 1768. 73. See n. 63. 74. North Briton CXXVIII (30 September 1769). 75. Newcastle Journal, 11 June 1768. 76. E.g., Newcastle Journal, 14 April 1770; The Ringers of St. Margaret's Westminster to Wilkes, n.d., B.L. Add. MSS 30876 f. 126. 77. Worcester Journal, 19 May 1768. 78. Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 188-189. 79. Worcester Journal, 4 August 1768. 80. Salisbury Journal, 8 January 1770. 81. Worcester Journal, 31 March 1768. 82. Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 14 May 1768. 83. Western Flying Post, 14 May 1770. 84. See n. 30. 85. Butler, Number Symbolism, chap. 1. 86. Newcastle Journal, 30 April 1768. 87. Gloucester Journal, 20 August 1770; Worcester Journal, 4 February 1768. 88. Worcester Journal, 21 April 1768. 89. Salisbury Journal, 16 April 1770. 90. Newcastle Journal, 14 April 1770. 91. General Evening Post, 17 April 1770. 92. Middlesex Journal, 22 April 1769; Newcastle Journal, 14 April 1770; Worcester Journal, 2 November 1769. 93. Gloucester Journal, 3 June 1771; Worcester Journal, 4 February 1768. 94. Brewer, "The Wilkites and the Law, A Study in Radical Notions of Governance," in An Ungovernable People? Englishmen and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and John Styles (forthcoming). 95. Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Lindebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (London, 1975), pp. 17-63; E. P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebian Culture," Journal of Social History VII (1974), 382405. 96. See the excellent critique of the neo-Durkheimian view in Steven Lukes, "Political Ritual and Social Integration," Essays in Social Theory, pp. 62-73.

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